
Copyriglitls . 



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WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 



THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 



THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY 

SEW YORK 

THE J. K. GILL COMPANY 

PORTLAND, OREGON 

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

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THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 

TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, SENDAI 

THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY 

SHANGHAI 



WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? 



A STUDY OF 
RIVAL INTERPRETATIONS 



BY 

GEORGE CROSS 




THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 



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Copyright 1918 By 
The University of Chicago 



All Rights Reserved 



Published April 1918 



APR 27 1918 



Composed and Printed By 

The University of Chicago Press 

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 



©CLA497088 



TO MY WIFE 



PREFACE 

The aim of this work is to assist the intelligent Chris- 
tian layman and the minister of the gospel who have felt 
the need of revising their doctrinal inheritance to reach 
a more satisfactory interpretation of the Christian faith. 
Everyone who has taken the pains to acquaint himself 
in any tolerable degree with the effects which the adop- 
tion of the methods of modern science in many fields of 
theological investigation has produced in the minds of 
great numbers of students for the ministry must be aware 
of the imperativeness of thinking through afresh the 
essential problems of theology. In no department of 
Christian thought is this imperativeness more evident 
than in the subject of apologetics. The older works on 
this subject, notwithstanding the splendid philosophic 
ability exhibited in many of them, demonstrably fail to 
meet the most insistent questions of our times. The 
discussions presented in this volume are, in the mind of 
the author, preparatory to a statement and vindication 
of the truth of the Christian religion. They do not con- 
stitute a formal introduction to such a task, as anyone 
can easily see. But it is hoped that a survey of the best- 
known types of the Christian faith will assist the inquir- 
ing reader to reach at least a point of view from which his 
work of formulating a theology for himself may begin. 

What is here written is the fruit of a great many years 
of reading and reflection combined with the searching 
experiences of the classroom. In order that the work 

vii 



viii Preface 

might be reasonably brief there has been a general avoid- 
ance of digression, however great the temptation at 
times, and the statements made are very condensed, on 
the whole. But I trust that the style is sufficiently 
popular to enable the reader who is unskilled in the 
technique of formal theology to read the book with some 
satisfaction. 

The contents of the volume, excepting the last 
chapter and such slight revisions as seemed necessary, 
have already appeared as a series of articles in the 
Biblical World. My thanks are due to the publishers 
of this journal for their consent to the publication of 

them in book form. 

George Cross 

Rochester, New York 
December 21, 191 7 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Introduction i 

CHAPTER 

I. Apocalypticism 3 

1. The Origin of Jewish Apocalypticism .... 10 

2. Principal Features of Jewish Apocalypticism . . 17 

3. Apocalypticism in Early Christianity .... 22 

4. Apocalypticism in Catholic and Protestant Creeds 30 

5. Value of Apocalypticism 33 

II. Catholicism 38 

1. Catholicism as a Type of Religious Life .... 41 

2. Catholicism as a Type of Morality or a Form of 

Conduct 47 

3. Catholicism as an Institutional System or a Church 53 

4. Catholicism as a Philosophy or Body of Doctrines 57 

III. Mysticism 60 

1. The Appearing of Mysticism in Historical Chris- 

tianity .... 6& 

2. Outstanding Characteristics of Christian Mysticism 75 

3. The Method of Christian Mysticism .... 79 

4. The Strength and the Weakness of Mysticism in 

Christianity 83 

IV. Protestantism 87 

1. Historical Sources of Protestantism 91 

2. The Protestant Religious Spirit 97 

3. The Protestant Estimate of Human Life — Its Moral 

Outlook 103 

4. Protestantism as a Theory of Truth — Its Doctrinal 

Standards no 

5. Protestantism on Its Institutional Side . . . . 113 

ix 



x Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

V. Rationalism 115 

1. Rationalism in Historical Christianity . . . . 122 

2. The Principles and Dogmas of Rationalism . . 131 

3. A Brief Estimate of Christian Rationalism . . . 140 

VI. EVANGELICISM OR MODERNIZED PROTESTANT CHRIS- 
TIANITY I44 

i. Some Constructive Religious Forces in Modern 

Christianity 144 

2. Some Secular Forces Contributing to the Formation 

of a New Type of Christianity 151 

3. The Influence of Recent Attempts to Understand 

Christianity 158 

4. A Characterization of Evangelicism . . . . ,166 

VII. What, Then, Is Christianity ? 172 

Bibliography 205 

Index 211 



INTRODUCTION 

Christianity is the name commonly given to the 
religion that came into existence through the career of 
Jesus of Nazareth and professedly preserves his char- 
acter to this day. Christianity is a religion; that is, the 
name stands for a way in which men seek unitedly to 
come into communion with the eternal and invisible, a 
way in which they attempt to enter into happy relations 
with the Supreme Being. It is a historical religion; that 
is, it had its beginnings at a definite period of human life 
in this world and the course of its progress from age to 
age is traceable. It is a religion whose votaries aim at 
honoring the worth of him from whom it sprang by call- 
ing themselves by a name that designates his supreme 
place among men — Christ, Anointed of God, Sent of 
Heaven, King of their Hearts — Christians, Christ-ones. 

When the historian unfolds before our eyes the man- 
ner in which this mighty spiritual movement has spread 
throughout the world and continued through the cen- 
turies, our attention is transfixed and our thought is 
challenged. What is it? What does it mean? Its 
phenomena are so vast and so varied and its followers 
have differed so much among themselves that at times 
one is tempted to say that there is often little or nothing 
more than the name in common. Yet even the posses- 
sion of a common name is significant. The name may 
supply the clue to the true interpretation of its character. 
At any rate, for the intelligent man the attempt to inter- 
pret it is inevitable. 



*J 2 What Is Christianity? 



The interpretation of Christianity is not exclusively 
the work of the scholar and philosopher. For the home 
of this religion has not been mainly in the high places of 
human life but more especially in the lives of the common 
people. They have given the most abundant inter- 
pretation. The conscious interpretation of it by the 
professional thinker is dependent on the popular, half- 
involuntary, half -conscious interpretation that is offered 
in the ways of the masses of believers — their spontaneous 
religious speech, acts of worship, songs, prayers, modes of 
conduct, customs of assembly, and methods of organiza- 
tion. The thinker must try to account for these things. 

The interpretations of Christianity that have ap- 
peared are numerous. In our survey it will be neces- 
sary to pass by many that are of only minor interest 
and limit our study to the great outstanding types. We 
shall select six — Apocalypticism, Catholicism, Mysticism, 
Protestantism, Rationalism, and Evangelicism. These 
overlap and mingle, of course, but they are sufficiently 
distinct to stand apart in our study. 



CHAPTER I 
APOCALYPTICISM 

It is related in the Gospel of Mark that at a critical 
point in his career "Jesus asked his disciples, saying unto 
them, Who do men say that I am ? And they told him, 
saying, John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but others, 
One of the prophets. And he asked them, But who say 
ye that I am? Peter answereth and saith unto him, 
Thou art the Messiah" (Greek, Christ). 

These are momentous words, for they record the first 
historic confession of the Christian faith. It seems to 
have risen spontaneously to the lips of the disciple when 
the Master's great question was asked and he spoke with 
the evident assurance that he was uttering the convic- 
tion that bound him and his companions together in a 
common allegiance and a common hope. Here, there- 
fore, we date the beginning of the Christian religion. 
Here, for the first time, the followers of the Nazarene 
were consciously differentiated from the rest of men by 
their unanimous trust in his mission. Here, too, for the 
first time, Jesus was placed outside the category of com- 
mon men, even of the highest and best of them, and 
assigned a unique place in the world. What, more 
precisely, that place should be was as yet vaguely 
conceived in the minds of his followers. The colloquy 
that follows Peter's confession reflects a clash of ideas 
on the subject among his disciples from the outset. 
The controversy about him that has continued for 



4 What Is Christianity? 

centuries was then at its beginning, and the end of it 
is not even yet in sight. 

Among the many Christian confessions that rise up 
as way-marks along the road of Christian history, Peter's 
confession enjoys a pre-eminence, and that for a better 
reason than its priority in time. For it has always been 
and still remains the most popular of them all. In this 
stock confession of Christendom subject and predicate 
have become so closely united that the two words, Jesus 
and Christ, regularly stand together as a single personal 
name. Moreover, this confession is the parent of all the 
others. For they are all enlargements or modifications 
of it, and they indicate the manner in which faith in the 
messiahship of Jesus has infused a new meaning into 
beliefs that arose at first independently of it. We can 
say — for we see it now as it was impossible for those 
early disciples to see it — that the Petrine confession 
marked the rise of a new religion among men. It did 
not seem so, I say, at the time. For to say that Jesus 
was the Christ seemed at first simply to say that through 
him was to come the realization of the Jewish hope. 
But the actual outcome was vastly different from what 
anyone could have anticipated. For it was only a little 
while before the new faith found itself in violent conflict 
with the Judaism out of whose bosom it sprang. A 
dramatic account of that conflict appears in the early 
chapters of the Acts and is reflected by anticipation, as 
it were, upon the accounts of Jesus' career. The root 
of the controversy lay in the question whether the 
faith in Jesus did not represent the true Judaism. And 
now, after the lapse of all the intervening centuries, it is 
still an open question whether, after all, it was not mis- 



Apocalypticism 5 

leading to call Jesus the Christ. Did not Peter's con- 
fession introduce into the minds of Jesus' followers a 
misconception of the character and purpose of Jesus? 
In assigning to him the character and the purpose of the 
Jewish Messiah did it not pervert his true aim and theirs ? 
And has not the Christian faith been burdened with 
beliefs in consequence from which it still seeks relief? 
This is in part the subject of our present discussion. 

The significance of the primitive confession that 
Jesus was the Messiah is to be perceived only by refer- 
ence to the whole circle of ideas to which the term 
belongs. For the story of the origin and development 
of Jewish Messianism the reader must be referred to 
the works of specialists, to whom of late we owe a great 
increment of knowledge on the subject. It is not 
possible in the present connection to do more than indi- 
cate in a general manner the conditions and conceptions 
out of which it sprang. Jewish Messianism is a promi- 
nent feature of a specifically Jewish philosophy which 
men have called Apocalypticism. Jewish Apocalyp- 
ticism is a modification, under the influence of the Jewish 
religious spirit, of a widespread, if not universal, oriental 
philosophy of the universe and of human life. The 
character of this philosophy we shall expound more fully 
presently. The thing we wish to point out just now is 
that the effect of the adoption by Jesus' followers of 
Peter's confession was to carry Jewish Messianism over 
into the new Christian community and thereby bring 
the minds of Christians so directly under the power of 
Jewish Apocalypticism that it became naturalized in 
their interpretation of their new faith. That is to say, 
Christians found, first of all, in the formulas of Jewish 



6 What Is Christianity? 

Apocalypticism a body of ideas by which they were 
enabled to express to themselves and to others the sig- 
nificance and worth of the personality and career of 
Jesus. Christian Apocalypticism is a Jewish heritage. 
The conceptions by which the religious Jew was wont 
to set forth his hopes for the future were transferred 
to the Christian mind and became the instruments of 
its self-expression. This was quite natural at a time 
when the great body of believers in Jesus came of Jewish 
stock. But the union of Christian faith and Jewish 
philosophy, which was so natural to men of the pharisaic 
type of mind, has continued to the present day when the 
naturalness of it is no longer clear. We shall see that, 
like so many other marriages, it has been both for better 
and for worse. Its fruit is mingled evil and good. 

On the other hand, the fact that conceptions that 
were formerly distinctively Jewish have obtained a 
powerful hold on many other peoples and races and 
have maintained their hold on them for long centuries 
creates a presumption that these conceptions must have 
belonged originally to mankind at large or, at least, have 
borne such a likeness to prevailing conceptions among 
other peoples that the transition from one to the other 
must have been easy and natural. The comparative 
study of religions has confirmed the presumption. We 
were formerly trained so thoroughly in the belief that 
the Jews were most especially a people separate from all 
others that we forgot they were the natural heirs of 
ecumenical traditions. The Jews were but a single 
branch of the Israelitish people, the Israelites of the 
Hebrews, the Hebrews of the Semites, and the Semites 
of the stock of that ancient humanity whose story has 



Apocalypticism 7 

been mostly lost to us. The Jews were, therefore, the 
natural heirs of the traditions of many races, whatever 
traditions they may have had that were peculiarly their 
own. Their likeness to the common Semitic stock, at 
least, was much more marked than their unlikeness. 
Then, too, their geographical location in Palestine, that 
ancient battle-ground of many mighty peoples, brought 
them into close contact with the great complex of experi- 
ences and ideas that constituted the culture of the 
ancient world. Their acquisitiveness as a people, com- 
bined with their individuality, enabled them to stamp the 
traditions that had flowed down to them from many 
sources with their own distinctive characteristics. This 
inheritance of theirs became woven through and through 
with their monotheism and their highly moral concep- 
tions of the nature of the Deity and of man's relation to 
him and then, through the dispersion of the Jews, was 
given to the world. This position is thoroughly con- 
firmed by the critical study of the Jewish Scriptures and 
the recovery of the knowledge of ancient mythology. 
It may not be possible to disentangle completely the 
different strands that have been woven into the Jewish 
Scriptures, yet it is perfectly plain to the discriminating 
student that much of the folklore and mythology that 
belonged to other nations recurs in the Old Testament, 
but has been transformed there by the higher spirit that 
was given to the Jews. 

Now the striking thing about the traditions of primi- 
tive culture is the similarity of the main strands of their 
folklore and their myths even when the various peoples 
concerned were far separated in time and distance and 
without apparent contact with one another. The peoples 



8 What Is Christianity? 

that were able to establish stable governments over 
large territories and to secure the safety essential to the 
growth of the higher forms of culture wrought up these 
primitive stories into literary and philosophic forms, but 
did not obliterate their original features, so that the 
link of connection between the cruder and the finer cul- 
ture of antiquity has been preserved. Their underlying 
unity is discernible. The general themes of these ancient 
constructive efforts of the human mind are the same 
everywhere. They all reflect in highly dramatic and 
realistic form the effect produced upon the spirits of men 
by the constant struggle with the powers of material 
existence. They tell the story of the destructive fury 
of malignant forces that assail men and also the story 
of deliverance from these foes. Their interest was not 
so very different from the interest with which we today 
pursue our study of the world and of man, namely, the 
aim to realize the highest well-being. But the place 
which is taken by abstract ideas in our present philoso- 
phies was occupied by realistic, semi-personal creations 
of the ancient mind. In what we are pleased to call — 
in less marked anthropomorphic form — the impersonal 
forces of nature, men of old saw the operations of living 
beings. What we figuratively describe as the battle of 
the elements they regarded as the actual encounters of 
real animate existences possessed of passions like ours. 
Whether we turn to the mythology of the Egyptians, 
Chaldeans, Assyrians, Iranians, Indians, or Greeks, the 
interest is the same, namely, the framing of an account 
of the origin of the woes and the blessings of men through 
the operations of what we call, somewhat blankly, 
"nature," but what they, in part, personalized. 



Apocalypticism g 

These mythologies present three outstanding features 
in common: First of all, prominence is given to the 
material forces against which men seem to have struggled 
so often in vain — stormy seas, raging floods, torrential 
rains, earthquakes, and fires. These forces working 
harm to hapless men are viewed as great monsters of 
transcendent might, say, a great dragon or a serpent 
in the deep or in the sky. Sometimes by a fusion of 
traditions these monsters were multiplied. Secondly, 
human experiences of deliverance from these baneful 
forces are pictured as the beneficent deeds of some great 
hero, generally more distinctly human in form than were 
these dangerous beings, but still superhuman. These 
saviors of men throttle and subdue the evil powers and 
rescue men from sufferings and calamities by a higher 
control of cosmic forces. Thirdly, there was a repre- 
sentation of a Golden Age in the distant past when men 
were without their present trials, and for the return of 
that age they fondly hoped. Perhaps we should say 
that this was not so much a memory of the past as an 
anticipation of the future reflected upon the past and 
held as a ground of encouragement for the future. 

Here is a pictorial philosophy so widespread among 
the ancients that it seems to be native to men. It consti- 
tutes a view of things that is both a cosmic philosophy 
and a philosophy of salvation. It sets forth the three 
main forms of experience in which men become aware of 
their universal kinship. First, their sufferings and mis- 
fortunes are due to forces too mighty for them to master 
or control unaided. Secondly, there is deliverance from 
these trials through intervention from on high, and with 
this goes the sense of dependence on a Savior-friend. 



io What Is Christianity? 

Finally, there is the hope of an ideal state to come, but 
founded from the beginning of human life — a heaven, a 
paradise. These three features are found, indeed, in all 
religions, and they remind us that there never has been, 
as there never can be, a religion that does not embrace 
in the end a philosophy of all being. 

What has all this to do with Peter's confession that 
Jesus was the Messiah ? Much in every way, but prin- 
cipally because in effect the confession connected the 
career of Jesus hopefully with those universal human 
feelings of need and longing for deliverance of which we 
have spoken, and because it made him personally the 
bearer of that deliverance. It placed Jesus, in effect, 
at the very heart of all the distracting problems that 
press for human solution and declared that he could 
supply the answer to them. To be sure, Peter could 
scarcely have been even dimly aware of this at that time. 
The confession was purely Jewish in its conscious pur- 
port. It pronounced Jesus a purely Jewish deliverer, 
and the disciples were very slow to perceive afterward a 
larger meaning in their faith, but none the less it pre- 
pared the way for the universalization of the Christian 
faith, because the Jewish messianic hope was the uni- 
versal human hope intensified, purified, and exalted 
through the peculiar experiences of the Jewish people. 
A few words must now be said in further explanation and 
justification of this statement. 

I. THE ORIGIN OF JEWISH APOCALYPTICISM 

It was suggested above that in earlier stages of 
their life as a people the Israelites were so much like to 
the surrounding peoples in character that it would be 



A pocalypticism 1 1 

difficult to distinguish the qualities that made them 
excel. But in course of time, under the leadership of 
those men of deep moral insight and moral vision we call 
the prophets, they grew to be a nation enjoying as their 
distinctive dignity the consciousness of a relation to their 
God fundamentally different from that relation which 
other peoples conceived they bore to their gods. For 
while the popular view of the relation between the 
peoples and their gods was that of consanguinity or phys- 
ical kinship, and while this inevitably involved the god 
in each case in the fate of his people, in the view of the 
prophets the national existence of Israel was based upon 
a mutual covenant between him and them to which, in 
the end, every individual Israelite was a partner. Thus 
the basis of their national life was moral rather than 
physical, because the covenant-relation is established by 
an act of choice rather than by physical necessity. This 
also made the continuance of their God Jahwe's protec- 
tion of them dependent on their obedience to the terms 
of that covenant. Out of this relation arises the idea of 
law. It is quite in keeping with this whole conception 
that the prophets should constantly insist that the test 
of all action, both national and personal, was found in 
the law of their God, and that their well-being depended 
on their obedience to it. To attempt to trace the effects 
of this belief upon the spiritual life of the whole nation 
would carry us too far afield for our present purposes, 
but it is easy to understand how from this point of view 
there grew up in the minds of the people the conviction 
of the superiority of their God to all other gods and at 
the same time the sense of their own superiority to other 
peoples. The corollary of such a conviction is the 



12 What Is Christianity? 

persuasion of their own indestructibility as a people. 
Other peoples might perish, but they could not because 
their God was above all gods. It was this belief that bore 
them up in their times of fearful struggle with nations or 
empires of far greater material power than they, and that 
gave them confidence that they should survive all defeats 
and be more than conquerors in the end. It was in sup- 
port of this confidence that the prophets reinterpreted the 
popular lore of the race from the earliest ages with a view 
to showing that the course of all the peoples and of the 
material world from the beginning was directed in con- 
formity with the purpose of God to select Israel as a 
people for himself and to give them ultimate supremacy 
over all others. With this object in mind they continu- 
ally offered forecasts of a day of deliverance and triumph 
to come. 

The eyes of the prophets were therefore upon the 
future. For them the true Golden Age, even if at times 
they did idealize the past, was yet to come. It seems 
that the people were fond of speaking of the coming 
" Day of Jahwe" when he should triumph for them over 
their enemies and his. The prophets were able to 
impart a profoundly moral character to this prospect. 
Their predictions of blessing for Israel in that day 
were interspersed with warnings; for while, as the 
people thought, it was to be a day of judgment on all 
nations, it was not less to be a day of judgment for 
Israel as well. It would bring retribution for the 
wicked as well as reward for the righteous. And that 
meant that there was to be a distinction made within 
Israel as truly as a distinction between Israel and 
other peoples. Indeed, in some prophetic utterances 



A pocalypticism 1 3 

the principle of righteous judgment seems to be applied 
indiscriminately as respects the different nations. Thus 
there rose up in the prophetic mind the overpowering 
conception of a great Judgment Day for the vindication 
of righteousness among all men — one of the great spirit- 
ual gifts of Israel to the world. 

It might be expected that the successive overthrow 
of the Northern and Southern kingdoms of the Israelitish 
people, their captivity in foreign lands, their pitiable 
weakness on the economic side, and their political hope- 
lessness would strain this fundamental conviction to the 
breaking-point. That they survived their downfall, 
that in the minds of many of the people of Judah their 
sense of moral superiority remained unimpaired, and 
their confidence in the ultimate salvation of the righteous 
stood firm, is one of the miracles of history. The effect 
of their bitter experiences was to intensify the confidence 
of the pious Jew in the power of his God. The darker 
their material and political outlook, the more fervent 
became their religious faith and hope. The Day of 
Jahwe would most surely come, but the deliverance it 
would bring should not be accomplished by the sword 
of Judah, but by the irresistible intervention of their 
God from on high. The day of judgment upon man- 
kind should be a day of salvation for the suffering 
righteous. 

It is evident that the misfortunes of these people 
occasioned a vast revolution in their religion. The 
destruction of the monarchy upon which the prophets 
had devoted so much of their energy in an attempt to 
keep the kings true to the higher faith, the obliteration 
of the political state, the exile from the land that they 



14 What Is Christianity? 

called the land of Jahwe, the ruination of their sanctu- 
aries and of the worship there, led to a spiritualization of 
their religious belief; the contact with Babylonian and 
Persian civilization broadened their horizon. A new 
world on high was opened to the eye of their imagination, 
and a vaster world on the earth spread before them. 
And consequently a new destiny lay beyond. Their 
God no longer dwelt in the temple made with hands or 
even in the land of Palestine but in the high heaven above 
them. They learned from Babylon and Persia to people 
that heaven with exalted beings whose nature was suited 
to the invisible better world, and whose business it was 
to act as the messengers of the unseen God and carry out 
his decrees on earth. All the so-called gods were no 
gods at all. The evident hopelessness of a struggle with 
the mighty empires whose power was made manifest to 
them every day, and the fading character of all material 
prosperity, turned their minds to the heaven. There 
the pious Jew fixed his gaze, and while the hope of a 
restoration of the earthly kingdom of Israel still lingered, 
the progress of events tended to give to this earthly 
kingdom more and more a miraculous character while it 
should last; but it came to be conceived by many a Jew 
as having only a limited duration and as destined to 
give place to a kingdom in the heaven that should last 
forever. 

A new interest was henceforth taken in the present 
and future state of the dead. The old view that all men 
went to one place and met the same fate and that the 
present life was the scene of all punishment and reward 
passed with the passing of confidence in the perpetuity 
and worth of a political kingdom on earth and the rise 



Apocalypticism 15 

into prominence of the distinction of righteous and 
unrighteous within the nation. The righteous must 
have a place in the new kingdom. If that kingdom was 
to be ushered in by a judgment, then there must be a 
judgment for the jdead as well as for the living. The 
idea of a resurrection of the dead came as a consolation 
to those who contended for the supremacy of righteous- 
ness; and with this the old idea of Sheol, as the final 
abode of all indiscriminately, gave way. Sheol could 
no longer be a place of hopelessness for all, or if Sheol 
was the place of the wicked there must be another abode 
for the righteous, though it was difficult to say where 
it should be before the resurrection. With this new 
interest in the dead arose many speculations and guesses 
about the unseen regions. There was no unanimity of 
opinion. But new regions began to appear — Heaven, 
Paradise, Sheol, Gehenna, were distinguished, but their 
relations were obscure. Whether there was to be a 
resurrection of all the dead for judgment or a resurrec- 
tion of the righteous only was uncertain. With the 
incoming of Greek influence came a doubt of the reality 
or value of any resurrection or of any material kingdom. 
There was a tendency to spiritualize everything and to 
fix attention upon the hope of a life eternal in a purely 
spiritual world; but this view was probably that of the 
few. Yet amid all the differences of speculation there 
stood out clearly the firm belief in a coming universal 
judgment and end of the world. The latter was usually 
conceived as ushered in by a fire which should destroy 
the present order of things and the wicked with it. 

There is one feature in this development of the Jewish 
religious spirit that claims our special interest, namely, 



1 6 What Is Christianity? 

the expectation of the coming of a King-Messiah. In 
the earlier prophetic delineation of the glory of the com- 
ing kingdom there appeared from time to time pictures 
of an ideal king through whom their God would establish 
the power and prosperity of his people. The destruction 
of the two kingdoms and the subsequent exile rendered 
the fulfilment of the prophetic hope a physical impos- 
sibility. The nationalism of which the prophets were 
the spokesmen gradually faded away with the experi- 
ences of the captivity. It became to a large extent 
unnecessary. For the nationalism of the prophets was 
too narrow for those who gained the universalistic out- 
look upon the world and the spiritual interpretation of 
things that came through contact with the larger gentile 
views of existence. A great modification of the mes- 
sianic expectation became necessary if it was to survive 
and minister to the religious life of men. The Messiah 
must take on a character in keeping with the new views 
of the world and of salvation. A mere son of David 
could never fulfil the functions of a Judge of all mankind 
and of the Ruler of a kingdom that came from heaven. 
He must be a heavenly being and, like the kingdom, must 
also descend from heaven to earth. Would he not live 
and reign forever ? But here again there was much con- 
fusion. The old and the new mingled as the new seers 
sought to connect their new views with the old prophetic 
declarations. Sometimes the temporal kingdom receives 
no recognition whatever, but all is heavenly. The 
Messiah of such a kingdom would be a heavenly and 
eternal being. At one time (in Second Enoch) it is 
said that the kingdom will last a thousand years, or 
again (in Fourth Esdras) that it will last four hundred 



Apocalypticism 17 

years — corresponding to the four hundred years in 
Egypt — but the Messiah was to die at the close. Some- 
times the expectation of a Messiah is entirely wanting, 
and Jahwe himself is the immediate deliverer of his 
people and Judge of the world. The Messiah is at one 
time a mighty monarch ruling all nations in righteous- 
ness, and again he is a co-sufferer with his people. Thus 
nationalism and universalism, materialism and spiritual- 
ism, were mingled in the post-exilian life of the Jews, and 
the minds of the people were divided. 

In this rude survey of the spiritual development of 
the Jewish people we have covered many centuries and 
reached the times of Jesus himself. The advent of Jesus 
and his message to the world, directly or through his 
disciples, were contemporary with the later phases of 
this evolution. While, therefore, Peter's confession that 
Jesus was Messiah connects Jesus with the ideas out- 
lined above, it does not determine which of these various 
and conflicting views of the character of the coming 
kingdom, of the manner of its establishment, and of the 
end of the world were uppermost or even present in the 
minds of his followers. This much, however, is plain — 
that the new faith obtained the formulas of its expression 
through the conceptions whose development we have 
sought to outline. We shall now attempt to state why 
we have described this view of things by the term 
Apocalypticism. 

2. PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF JEWISH APOCALYPTICISM 

The contact with Babylonian and Persian culture in 
the earlier period following upon the destruction of the 
Jewish state and the contact with Greek culture in the 



18 What Is Christianity? 

later period — to mention only the most important for- 
eign influences — gave a powerful stimulus to the Jewish 
intellect and vastly widened its horizon. Babylonian 
astrology and Persian dualism gave to the Jews a new 
knowledge of the world, and Grecian thought gave them 
a new view of its meaning. This intellectual expansion 
was accompanied by a deepening of their moral and 
religious life. This came to them as a consolation for 
their terrible losses. Two real worlds, the heaven and 
the earth, besides the shadowy realm of Sheol, or the 
underworld, now came into view. Man is of the earth, 
and his days are few. But Jahwe God is in the high 
heaven above all earthly things and free from all earthly 
contingencies. There he lives and reigns eternally. 
Superhuman beings serve him there. He rules also on 
the earth, and the angels of his power go forth from his 
presence bearing his decrees and effecting his purposes 
on the earth. All events that occur on the earth are 
determined in advance in heaven. So to say, that which 
took place on earth was first enacted in heaven and must 
inevitably come to pass. If men could but enter heaven, 
or if the veil that separates heaven from earth could 
be withdrawn for a time, men would be able to see 
beforehand the things which are to come to pass. 
What is true of the earth is also true of the under- 
world, for Jahwe is lord there also and predetermines 
the fate of its denizens. Thus there lies before men 
the possibility of obtaining a knowledge of the distant 
future. 

The possibility becomes an actuality. The new 
world becomes the basis of a new view of human knowl- 
edge. Men have actually witnessed the lifting of the 



Apocalypticism 19 

veil between heaven and earth. There have been apoca- 
lypses, revelations, of those things that happen in heaven. 
Men have had visions of that realm and they have heard 
voices speaking to them from it. The disclosures that 
came to men in this way are not to be classed with things 
that they learn in the ordinary manner. The sight and 
the hearing they enjoyed were special gifts bestowed 
upon the few. They were the seers, the prophets of 
their God. This knowledge was not merely natural but, 
as we are accustomed to say, supernatural, miraculous. 
It was certain that they who obeyed the heavenly vision 
should infallibly be blessed. The word that came from 
heaven could not fail. 

Moreover, the apocalypses disclosed the secret causes 
of the events for whose coming believers were to look so 
hopefully. They belonged to the same order as the 
knowledge concerning them. They were not brought 
about through the normal working of those things we see 
about us, but by the special act, the determining will, of 
God. Apart from this they could not happen. If God 
thus intervened by his mighty power to bring to pass 
things that would be otherwise impossible, then the 
tremendous events which the seers were now foretelling 
and which seemed so contrary to expectation — the 
descent of the Messiah from heaven, the resurrection 
from the dead, the assembling of all mankind for judg- 
ment, the burning of the world and the wicked with it, 
and the creation of a new world for the righteous or the 
taking of them up into heaven — would surely occur. 
Here, then, their religious faith found its firm support. 
With such a basis of confidence an oppressed and impov- 
erished people could bid defiance to all the powers of this 



20 What Is Christianity? 

world or the world beneath. These are the themes of 
the Jewish apocalyptic. 

It is a very striking feature of those Jewish apoca- 
lypses which have been committed to writing that they 
are all pseudonymous. The writers conceal their per- 
sonal authorship under the name of some accredited 
prophet or worthy of the past. Such names as Enoch, 
the Twelve Patriarchs, Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, 
Daniel, Ezra, are attached to the apocalypses. What is 
the secret of this self-effacement? It could not have 
been simply a means of avoiding the danger of identifica- 
tion which is often so real to the writers among an 
oppressed people. It must have been mainly for the 
sake of securing for their messages the credence that 
attached to the utterances of men who were commonly 
regarded as special messengers of their God — men who 
had seen the heavenly things and spoke by the spirit of 
Jahwe. That is to say, the authors of the Jewish apoca- 
lyptic firmly believed that their own utterances were 
revelations from heaven, visions given by God, and they 
sought to persuade their readers of the same by attribut- 
ing their works to men in whom the people already 
believed. This brings out another very interesting 
fact related to the production of Jewish apocalyptic. 
We shall indicate it. 

The apocalyptic * writings cover, roughly speaking, 
a period of time stretching from the second century 
before Christ to the end of the first Christian century. 
The events of the times before the captivity were now 
far back in the past. The common tendency among men 
to idealize the past was accentuated among the Jews of 
these later days through the contrast with their former 



Apocalypticism 21 

condition. Those patriotic statesmen of the former 
days who gave a moral interpretation of Israel's history 
and attempted to direct the policy of the state by their 
forecasts of coming changes were now among the national 
heroes. They had foretold the things that had come to 
pass. They were inspired of Jahwe. They had had 
visions of the heavenly things. The things which eye 
saw not and ear heard not and which entered not into 
the heart of the common man had been revealed to them. 
If the prophets had foretold the things which had already 
come to pass, why should they not also have foretold the 
things which were even yet to come ? And so the new 
seers, believing that they too had visions given them by 
God, disclaimed all honor for themselves and ascribed 
their experiences to the acknowledged sages of the past 
in order to establish the hearts of the people in the con- 
fidence that the things which they had seen in vision 
were really about to occur. This use of the works of the 
ancient prophets was possible through the collection of 
their writings by the learned and devout scribes of the 
people. They had not hesitated to attach the names of 
known prophets to writings whose authorship was un- 
known in order to preserve those works and secure for the 
whole body of the collected writings the veneration that 
would insure the loyal obedience of the people. That 
is to say, the scribes had already made a virtual canon of 
scripture, a collection of the utterances of men whose word 
was the word of God, the words of men who were given a 
knowledge inaccessible to others . Jewish Apocalypticism 
leans for support upon a canon of inspired scripture. 

We may now briefly summarize the results of our 
study to this point. First, Jewish Apocalypticism is an 



22 What Is Christianity? 

outcome of the doctrine of a dual world, the earth and 
the heaven above the earth. There was also a shadowy 
underworld obscurely related to the heaven, but like it 
in that it was ordinarily invisible. Secondly, it was a 
doctrine of the predetermination of all events by the 
irresistible decretive will of God, a doctrine of divine 
predestination. Thirdly, it was a doctrine of human 
knowledge of future events by means of supernatural 
vision, a theory of the knowledge of the invisible. 
Fourthly, it was a universalistic interpretation of human 
history in contrast with the narrower nationalism of the 
ancient prophets, and it thereby carried with it the 
enfranchisement of the individual. Finally, Apoca- 
lypticism offered a moral interpretation of all human 
history. Everything was viewed from the standpoint 
of a universal and final day of judgment (the idea of a 
canon of inspired scripture is intimately associated with 
Apocalypticism, but is not essential to it). If these 
things are so, Apocalypticism, so far from being a degen- 
erate offspring of prophetism, was the very flower of 
prophetism and brings the era of Jewish prophecy to a 
close. 

3. APOCALYPTICISM IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY 

We turn once more to the Petrine confession. The 
pronouncement that Jesus was the Messiah, while it did 
not determine which of the many different views that 
were current in Jewish apocalyptic was to become the 
Christian view, did finally interpret the mission of Jesus 
through the general apocalyptical view of the world and 
of human life. Apocalyptic became the native air in 
which early Christianity lived and breathed. It pro- 



Apocalypticism 23 

vided for the new age the answer to the question of the 
meaning of the career of Jesus, his relation to the all- 
determining will of God, and his relation to the destiny 
of mankind universally. Apocalyptic became for Jewish 
believers, and to a large extent for generations of gentile 
believers after them, the determinate mode of expressing 
the Christian faith. So closely do the cast of thought 
in the Jewish apocalyptic and the prevailing thought in 
the New Testament coincide that to the reader who is 
unacquainted with the Jewish Apocrypha, and whose 
knowledge of these ancient people is drawn wholly from 
the Old and the New Testament, it must have seemed, 
as he read the foregoing account of the character of 
Jewish Apocalypticism, that it was derived directly from 
the New Testament. 

The books of our New Testament came almost 
entirely, if not altogether, from the hands of Jewish 
believers in the messiahship of Jesus, and they are 
addressed to readers most of whom are presupposed to 
be familiar with Jewish thought. So far as the general 
type of thought is concerned, nothing stands out more 
prominently than the fact of our having before us there 
a Christian recast of the Jewish apocalyptic. This is a 
matter that claims our attention somewhat in detail. 

First of all, the New Testament is thoroughly charged 
with the consciousness of the contrast between two 
worlds, heaven and earth (with also a vague recognition 
of a real lower world different from both). The contrast 
turns in favor of the heaven. The interest and hope of 
believers are concentrated there. The presence and 
activity of God on earth and among men do not alter 
the fact that he is pre-eminently in heaven. The words 



24 What Is Christianity? 

of the invocation so dear to all Christendom make it 
indisputable: "Our father which art in heaven, hal- 
lowed be thy name." From thence came the Christ to 
earth and thither he has returned, to come a second time. 
Whether it be Matthew or Paul or John who speaks, it is 
the same. The conception is more or less realistic in all, 
and the very foundation of the Christian hope seems at 
times to lie there. Believers' expectations of future 
blessedness are made to depend on the reality of that 
heaven, for they hope to be raised from their graves or 
to ascend from the surface of the earth at the coming of 
Christ to be with him — though this is not the invariable 
way of putting it, and sometimes the language seems to 
be symbolic rather than literally descriptive. 

The denizens of these worlds are clearly distinguished, 
and for the most part easily recognized. Angels of God 
from heaven frequently appeared to the sight of believ- 
ing men, speaking to them, assisting them in their tasks 
or ministering to their comfort and well-being. Demons 
from the lower world were also banefully active every- 
where, afflicting men with ills or deceiving and beguiling 
them into sin — though there are no references to their 
visibility. Life is sometimes represented as a constant 
battle with these hidden foes, for while their home was 
in the underworld their operations were on the earth or 
even in the heights above where the good angels are. 
Hence the moral conflicts in which men were engaged 
might appear as pitched battles with monstrous spiritual 
forces in the higher regions. As Paul puts it — "Our 
wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the 
principalities, against the powers, against the world- 
rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of 



A pocalypticism 2 5 

wickedness in the heavenly places." What a dignity 
and grandeur was thereby attached to our human, moral 
struggles! Jesus had the angels of God at his command, 
and to him and his followers they rendered service. It 
will not do to call this mere religious rhetoric, for in those 
times it all seemed very real. 

So profoundly impressed were these first-century 
believers with the reality of their heritage in that higher 
world that the hope of the messianic kingdom, which 
they had inherited from the Jews, was conceived no 
longer, after the manner of the prophets, as growing up 
out of better moral conditions on the earth, but as the 
expectation of a city-state that should descend to earth 
out of the skies after the evil world had been destroyed. 
The imagery of the New Testament, when these themes 
are discussed, is most impressive. For vividness and 
magnificence these portrayals have never been excelled. 
And no wonder, because the stake was the most momen- 
tous possible. No effort was spared to excite and sustain 
the expectation of a speedy apocalypse of the Redeemer 
from on high. Striking references to this hope are found 
almost everywhere. We quote a single passage from 
one of the letters of Paul: "For our citizenship is in 
heaven: from whence also we look for a Saviour, the 
Lord Jesus Christ: who shall fashion anew the body of 
our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body 
of his glory, according to the working whereby he is able 
even to subject all things to himself." 

When we turn to the accounts of the manner in which 
the gospel was proclaimed from the first the apocalypti- 
cal cast of thought is equally manifest. Visions, dreams, 
voices, and visitants from the heavenly realm are 



26 What Is Christianity ? 

frequent accompaniments of the early preaching. These 
were the seals of the divine authority of the message. 
Thus it is no cause of surprise if the conceptions, convic- 
tions, and reasonings of the speakers and writers were 
often viewed by them as direct impartations from heaven 
and incomparably higher in worth than the natural 
thoughts of men. In what other way was it open to 
them to affirm that they believed that the new life they 
were living was itself the life divine? The question 
which would trouble us today — how such things were 
psychologically possible — seems never to have occurred 
to them. The nearest they came to it was by referring 
their higher thoughts to the inner working of the Spirit 
of God on their minds. Many pages might be filled with 
quotations illustrative of the Apocalypticism of the New 
Testament writers. A few references must suffice. 

If we turn to the accounts of the birth of Jesus, we 
find the occurrences connected with it represented as the 
outcome of action from a higher divine world and not 
from the human will itself. For example, Matthew says : 
"Now the birth of Jesus was on this wise: when his 
mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they 
came together, she was found with child of the Holy 
Spirit." Then passing to Joseph's situation he adds: 
"But when he thought on these things, behold an angel 
of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, . . . ." 
And so the account continues. Magi from the East are 
guided to the young child by a moving star, and they 
return to their country by a different route because of a 
warning from God by a dream. By a dream Joseph is 
directed to take the child to Egypt, by a dream he is told 
by an angel to return, and by a dream he is warned to go 



Apocalypticism 27 

to Galilee. This is the manner in which the early Chris- 
tians expressed their confidence that Jesus had come to 
the world by the predetermining will of God, and that 
the earthly events pertaining thereto had been similarly 
ordered by God. In Luke's account the representations 
of heavenly intervention are even more vivid. Angelic 
messengers, divine inspirations, voices from the sky, 
signalize the advent of the expected Messiah. Or if we 
turn to the accounts of the death and resurrection of 
Jesus, we are equally impressed with the vigor of the 
apocalypses. Earthquakes, appearings of the dead to the 
living, the deeds and words of heavenly angels, startling 
appearings of Jesus himself, attest the truth of the faith 
in him and prove the supernatural character of his mis- 
sion. Or, again, if we take the accounts of his ministry, 
they are studded with occurrences of intervention from 
another world. A notable instance is the transfigura- 
tion. We quote from Mark: 

And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter and James 
and John and bringeth them up into a high mountain apart by 
themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his gar- 
ments became glistering, exceeding white, so as no fuller on earth 
can whiten them. And there appeared unto them Elijah and 
Moses; and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter answereth 

and saith unto Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here 

And there came a cloud overshadowing them; and there came a 
voice out of the cloud: This is my beloved Son: hear ye him. 
And suddenly looking round about, they saw no one any more, 
save Jesus only with themselves. 

This manner of narration is quite generally characteristic 
of the whole of the accounts of Jesus' career. They are 
cast in the mold of a belief in heavenly apocalypses. 
Everything is conceived miraculously. Now, to remove 



28 What Is Christianity? 

the miraculous elements from the story is to rob it of its 
peculiar power. It is not for us to seek to modernize 
these narratives by excising the overt interventions. 
That would be an act of violence destructive of the 
peculiar merits of the gospel records. While these 
accounts would sound very artificial if produced in our 
times, they were entirely natural to the minds of religious 
men in those times. 

It is, therefore, perfectly in keeping with the spirit of 
those times that Jesus should commonly express his mind 
in the forms of apocalyptic. There is scarcely an utter- 
ance of his of any length which does not embrace apoc- 
alyptical elements, and it is just what we might expect 
when we find him offering his disciples startling and 
impressive apocalyptical discourses before he suffered. 
As elsewhere, wars, pestilences, cleaving heavens, falling 
stars, visible descent of the Son of Man from heaven, and 
the judgment of the world are outstanding features. 
The great Apocalypse of John which stands at the end 
of our canon is, in its general spirit and mode of utter- 
ance, quite in harmony with the remainder of the Jewish 
material in our New Testament. It is a paean of coming 
triumph for Christians over their oppressive foes and the 
unseen forces of the regions of Evil. This concatena- 
tion of visions demonstrates the unconquerableness of 
the primitive faith. Taking for granted the dualistic 
cosmology, the belief that happenings on earth were pre- 
determined by heavenly enactments, the belief that dis- 
closures of the future outworking of the divine will are 
made to men through supernatural means, and the assur- 
ance that Jesus was the appointed King of the ages bound 
to overthrow the power of evil in the world, it is difficult 



Apocalypticism 29 

to conceive a more effective vindication of the early 
Christian faith than this book offers. 

It would not be well to pass to later periods of Chris- 
tian history without pointing out that the New Testa- 
ment contains many elements of a different character 
from the Jewish apocalyptic. As the Christian gospel 
was carried into distant portions of the Roman Empire 
and beyond, it met types of spirituality very different 
from the Jewish. The spirit of the Graeco-Roman phi- 
losophy of religion, especially in Gnosticism, and the 
Roman conception of world-government were mighty 
forces to be reckoned with by any propaganda that 
sought to become world-wide. The Christian gospel 
had to adjust itself to the new demands these made upon 
it and proved its world-dominating power by so doing. 
We shall speak later of the manner in which this was 
accomplished. It is sufficient at this point simply to 
state that already with New Testament times this work 
of assimilating ethnic spirituality had begun. The 
writings of Paul and John and the Epistle to the Hebrews 
are evidences. But it should be noted that even in those 
portions where the ethnic spirit is manifest the spirit of 
the apocalyptic survives and mingles with the other. 
We see it in the Pauline letters to the Colossians and the 
Ephesians. The writer, with all his ideas of the imma- 
nence of the divine and with his readiness to make use of 
the Gnostic cosmology, still thinks very largely in the 
terms of the Jewish apocalyptic. We see it in the Gospel 
of John, where the high mysticism and spirituality of the 
writer have not yet led him to abandon Apocalypticism. 
We see it also in Hebrews, where Alexandrian philosophy 
with all its allegorism has not succeeded in doing away 



30 What Is Christianity? 

with a literal heaven above the earth, the actual ascent 
of Jesus into it, and his future real descent. We con- 
clude, therefore, our study of the early Christain inter- 
pretation of Christianity by saying that, so far as the 
books of the New Testament disclose it to us, that inter- 
pretation is throughout prevailingly apocalyptical. 

4. APOCALYPTICISM IN CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT CREEDS 

An account of the influence of this interpretation of 
Christianity upon the life and thought of the ancient 
Greek church, the mediaeval Roman church, and modern 
Protestant churches, together with the controversies and 
divisions connected with the struggle between it and 
successive modernizations of it, would fill a volume. We 
must content ourselves with little more than a bare men- 
tion of those features of it which have persisted among 
the majority of Christians. 

It was not possible that the peoples of the Near East 
with their native spirit of piety of the metaphysical or 
mystical sort should, on becoming Christians, immedi- 
ately abandon that which had been sewn into their 
natures for centuries so as to become the warp and woof 
of their inner life and that Jewish Apocalypticism should 
be substituted for it. That would be an act of violence. 
Neither was it possible for the great church which was 
growing up and seeking to justify its claim to be the true 
and sole heir to the Christian tradition either to repudiate 
the early apocalyptic or rewrite it. The only thing that 
was possible if the church was to maintain its claims and 
retain all classes of believers within its bosom was that 
the traditional apocalyptic and the new philosophy 
should be written down together without an attempt to 



A pocalypticism 3 1 

reconcile them or an acknowledgment that a reconcilia- 
tion was needed. The retention of the primitive apoca- 
lyptic was all the more imperative since there was a 
growing belief that the writings of apostolic men were 
new " scriptures" and therefore an authoritative declara- 
tion of truth, a law of faith for all time. Thus it came 
about that when the church drew up her creed the new 
philosophy and the old interpretation of the apocalyp- 
ticists were placed side by side. In all the successive 
developments of the Nicene Creed of the ancient Catholic 
church there is reiterated the confession of the expecta- 
tion that Jesus Christ who had " ascended into heaven 
and sitteth on the right hand of the Father" was to 
"come again with glory, to judge both the quick and the 
dead; whose kingdom shall have no end." It is also 
affirmed: "I look for the resurrection of the dead," 
which is presently interpreted to mean, " the resurrection 
of the body," so as to set aside positively all spiritualiza- 
tions of that portion of the creed. 

When the Western church became Roman it was still 
farther from possibility that the apocalyptical interpre- 
tation should suffice. For the church had now con- 
sciously assumed the burden of responsibility for the task 
of renovating by normal means the very world of whose 
future Apocalypticism had despaired. Yet the Roman 
church was compelled, equally with the Greek church, 
to retain the ancient apocalyptical confession. But this 
Apocalypticism was no dead letter of the law of faith in 
this instance. On the contrary, it became a powerful 
instrument for impressing the popular mind with the 
transcendent worth of the moral implications of the 
Christian faith. The approach of the day of universal 



32 What Is Christianity? 

judgment, the resurrection of the dead in the body, the 
irrevocable sentence to heaven or hell, became the 
ground of those mighty appeals to the imagination and 
the conscience which have enabled the Roman church 
to hold its millions in leash. At the same time, also, 
the idea of a spiritual, miraculous, and exclusive com- 
munication of truth to chosen men became an instru- 
ment for fastening upon the people the claims of the 
church to obedience. 

Protestantism, with its biblicism and its insistence 
upon the restoration of the primitive faith in its purity, 
opened the door to a fuller restoration of Apocalypticism 
than Romanism permitted. It is true that the Prot- 
estant insistence upon the sole authority of the Scrip- 
tures has prevented a recrudescence among Protestants, 
to any appreciable extent, of the visions and trances that 
were so deeply cherished by Catholic pietists, but it 
logically demanded the restoration of the whole primitive 
view of things. That it did not commonly go so far 
among Protestants was owing to the strength of their 
moral convictions and their practical good sense. Never- 
theless it did pave the way for a repeated recrudescence 
of millenarianism with its pessimistic view of the world. 
From this Protestantism still suffers in many quarters, 
but, on the whole, it is to be said that Protestants have 
been content to use only those portions of ancient apoc- 
alyptic which were the main basis of the Catholic appeal 
to the minds of the people, namely, the factual represen- 
tation of the coming, the ascent, and the return of Jesus 
(in the distant future), the day of judgment, the resur- 
rection, the end of the world, and a literal heaven and hell. 
In one other respect Apocalypticism persists among 



Apocalypticism $$ 

Protestants. Their repudiation of an immanent author- 
ity in the church in favor of the plenary inspiration of 
the Scriptures tended to establish in the Protestant 
churches the view that the saving truth of religion is 
communicated to men through supranatural channels of 
transmission which are not to be subjected to the canons 
of our ordinary thinking. It is only in recent times that 
this feature of Apocalypticism has been giving way. 

5. VALUE OP APOCALYPTICISM 

We shall conclude the discussion of our subject with 
an estimate. Apocalypticism as an interpretation of 
Christianity has a fourfold merit: First, it affirms the 
reality of an unseen world. In this it makes response to 
a profound longing of the human heart. For among all 
enlightened peoples who have reflected deeply on the 
meaning of life, the transitory nature of the goods of this 
present world and their failure to satisfy the deepest 
longings of the heart have become proverbial. The 
spirit of man longs for the eternal and unchangeable, the 
city which has foundations, the things that cannot be 
shaken, whose goods, once attained, are ours forever. 
Such a world, if destined to be ours, would not only 
secure for us release from the pangs of failure and dis- 
appointment here, but the expectation of it would impart 
a spirit of resignation in the midst of present distresses. 
The records of Christian piety abound in proofs of this 
ministry of Apocalypticism. The persecuted in all the 
Christian centuries have borne unequivocal testimony to 
the sustaining power of the confidence in the reality of 
that better world. The belief in the reality of the visions 
men have had of that world has aided the minds of the 



34 What Is Christianity? 

unreflecting to reach an experience of peace, in striking 
contrast to the restlessness that springs from unaided 
speculation. 

But this has not proved to be an unmixed good. The 
low estimate of this present world by contrast has often 
led to a disparagement of the common tasks of life, a lack 
of sympathy for those whose lot is inextricably bound to 
material things, and a generally pessimistic and censori- 
ous spirit. Earth is too often regarded only in its con- 
trast with a heaven, and man only in his contrast with 
God. In its theory of the higher knowledge Apocalypti- 
cism exhibits another weakness. For by its depreciation 
of our ordinary thinking on religious subjects and its 
reference of all divine truth to supranatural means of 
communication open, as a matter of fact, to the favored 
few only, it has tended to the creation of a religious 
aristocracy and to a depreciation of scientific investiga- 
tion and philosophic inquiry. Where Apocalypticism 
has flourished there has been almost invariably a cor- 
responding low estimate of the value of the native work- 
ing of our minds and a shrinking from the severer tasks 
of learning. In short, by its predication of two separate 
worlds and its claims to a supranatural knowledge Apoc- 
alypticism tends to bisect our human life, to destroy its 
unity, and to make a free natural communion between 
God and man impossible. 

Secondly, Apocalypticism has the merit of affirming 
a purposive, divine government of the world. It lifts 
the whole of human life above the realm of chance. It 
leaves no room for fatalism or the idea that the course of 
the world is a meaningless round of happenings. More- 
over, it attaches a dignity to human affairs by holding 



Apocalypticism 35 

that in the midst of all complexity and seeming con- 
fusion there is an end toward which all moves, and there- 
fore there is order. Hence also the power of foresight 
and predetermination so characteristic of men is recog- 
nized as of like nature with the supreme power in the 
universe. There is therefore a dignity attached to 
human actions both good and bad. 

But this merit of Apocalypticism is seriously com- 
promised by its conception of the manner in which this 
divine end is attained. The world is supposed to be 
controlled from without, and its history has too arbitrary 
a character to permit us a reasoned view of its course. 
If the natural course of things is to be subjected, without 
warning, to interference from without, and nature's laws 
either do not exist as laws or they may be set aside at 
any time by flat from on high, then the mode of the 
divine government of the world is contrary to that which 
now commends itself to us in political circles as worthy 
of our allegiance today. 

Thirdly, Apocalypticism by its picture of a great judg- 
ment day stands for the supremacy and finality of right- 
eousness in the affairs of men. The expectation of such 
an event imparts a necessary sternness in the presence 
of crime. It tends to support the affirmations of the 
human conscience and to raise the moral powers of our 
nature to their rightful supremacy. It sets aside as 
frivolous every theory that tends to belittle the human 
personality, and it stamps as damnable every attempt to 
rob men of their moral initiative and responsibility. It 
tends, therefore, to confirm and to purify the efforts of 
civic communities to establish methods of unswerving 
justice in the government of the people. 



36 What Is Christianity? 

On the other hand, it may be doubted whether the 
postponement of the day of judgment to the distant 
future does not tend to a legalistic view of our relations 
to God and to an obscuration of the truth that the execu- 
tion of divine justice is immanent in human life, that 
the judgment day is now. It has thus indirectly sup- 
ported conceptions of salvation that represent it as an 
unnatural resort to special provisions for escaping at last 
the consequences of sins. Its views of life are serious, 
indeed, but not serious enough. 

Fourthly, Christian Apocalypticism has the merit of 
standing for the supreme worth of the personality of 
Jesus Christ as interpretative of the worth of our human 
personality and as the divine ideal which is to conquer 
the world. But by regarding him as coming into our 
world in unnatural ways from without, as accepting our 
earthly condition only for an interval and as now occupy- 
ing a realm altogether different from ours, it is open to 
the charge of making him appear like an accident in 
human history, and in the end as having only a partial 
kinship with us. The outcome must be a loss of con- 
fidence in the value of the hope of being like him 
here. 

It becomes a question for the modern Christian how 
far he may hold to those eternal realities set forth in 
Apocalypticism, how far he can be Christian and yet 
decline to be bound by the modes of thought and utter- 
ance so largely characteristic of the early Christian 
believers. Are we not more loyal to Jesus Christ and 
the faith he gave to men if we set aside as temporary the 
forms of that faith which cannot commend themselves 
to our best judgment and sincerest trust and at the same 



Apocalypticism 37 

time seek to retain and fulfil the spirit of his life than if 
we regard the spirit as bound to the letter ? Apocalyp- 
ticism was a natural mode of thought in early Christian 
days, but has it not become unnatural for our days? 
Do we not prove false to the inner spirit of Christianity 
if we continue to retain it ? 



CHAPTER II 
CATHOLICISM 

It is always hazardous for one who does not accept a 
place within a given religious communion to attempt a 
characterization of it. He seems to be at a disadvan- 
tage compared with a member of that communion. In 
the case of Catholicism the disadvantage is negligible, 
because the complex of forces and events comprised 
within it covers a period of eighteen centuries and affects 
vast areas of the earth and countless millions of people. 
On the other hand, the interpreter who has personally 
felt the impact of the religious power that is resident in 
Catholicism but does not feel any compulsion to justify 
its claims has a distinct advantage. 

The word " catholic " is from the Greek and means 
universal. Its employment as a designation of a Chris- 
tian communion seems to have occurred for the first time 
in the second century of the Christian era. The Chris- 
tian gospel had been preached widely in the Roman 
Empire and beyond, with the result that many local 
religious associations had been formed under the Chris- 
tian name but differing so widely in the traditions, cus- 
toms, and doctrines they held that there was danger lest 
the new faith be shipwrecked in the storm of general 
religious confusion. Many there were who strove to 
hold to the original, simple, but picturesque message of 
the early Jewish preachers. Others welcomed the new 
faith as furnishing older popular faiths with a higher 

38 



Catholicism 39 

meaning and sought for a philosophic comprehension 
of it. Others, again, tried a middle way. Controversy 
and division multiplied. There was danger lest the 
gospel be lost in a medley of realities, speculations, 
fancies, and superstitions. It was amid these circum- 
stances that, under the leadership of such men as Ignatius 
of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, an effort was put 
forth to stem the tendency toward disintegration by 
laying down a few broad statements purporting to be 
the invariable tradition held by the true churches the 
world over and constituting the apostolic standard of 
truth. In this respect, they said, the churches were all 
at one; in fact, they were one church. This one church 
— the church catholic — was alone the true church. Dif- 
ferences, therefore, came from without. Universalism 
was set up against individualism, authority against 
speculation and discovery, law against freedom. This 
is the beginning of Catholicism. 

During these eighteen centuries Catholicism has 
passed through three main stages of development. In 
those early times, when its main strength lay in the 
regions adjacent to the Eastern Mediterranean, where 
the Greek language was the principal medium for the 
exchange of ideas and Greek-speaking Christians were 
the principal leaders in the thought and action of Chris- 
tendom, there grew up the Eastern, or Greek, church, 
so called, with its cultivation of " mysteries, " its pro- 
found metaphysical speculations, its great creeds, and 
its episcopal organization. Later, when the faith spread 
through Western Europe, and its center of gravity was 
found at Rome, the custom of the Roman church became 
the standard for the West, and in the work of reducing 



40 What Is Christianity? 

the new threatening chaos to order there grew up the 
great mediaeval system of ecclesiastical administration 
with its headquarters in the "Eternal City" and its 
agents in every political center and every public place. 
Here stood the Western, or Roman, church over against 
the Eastern, or Greek, church, with a deep cleavage 
between them. Finally, when the free national, indus- 
trial, commercial, intellectual, moral, and religious forces 
that had been kept for a time in subjection by the Roman 
church got beyond control and in Protestantism found 
a larger life outside the Church of Rome, she found her- 
self mainly occupied in retaining the allegiance of those 
who still remained within her communion and in resisting 
Protestant attacks. Then appeared the reactionary, 
conservative, anti-modernist papal church of the present. 
Thus Catholicism has passed through three great stages. 
The schism between East and West made two mutually 
antagonistic churches, both of which, nevertheless, 
claimed to be Catholic. Then the Protestant revolution 
brought into existence many anti-Catholic Christian 
bodies that have disputed successfully with her the 
sovereignty of the Western world. Catholicism and 
universality have long since ceased to be synonyms. 
Catholicism is now a name designating a sect. 

Notwithstanding the wide differences that have 
appeared within Catholicism during these many cen- 
turies, there still remains a link of identity uniting the 
past and the present, and the most striking character- 
istics of Catholicism from the beginning remain. In 
discovering these we must remember that, while there 
is much of keen invention in Catholicism, the system is 
not so much an invention as a growth. For convenience 



Catholicism 41 

let us consider it in its four main aspects — as a type of 
piety or religious life, as a form of morality or conduct, 
as an institutional system or church, and as a philosophy 
or body of doctrine. 

I. CATHOLICISM AS A TYPE OF RELIGIOUS LIFE 

In this study we shall beware of drawing our infer- 
ences mainly from official acts and pronouncements, but 
we shall remember that the heart of Catholicism, like 
every other kind of religion, is found in the minds of the 
multitudes of its common people. Its rites and ceremo- 
nies, its rules and regulations for action, its great institu- 
tions, and its doctrines have come into being in response 
to real or imagined popular needs or demands. What, 
then, is the kind of piety that is cultivated among the 
Catholic masses ? 

Observe, at the outset, the attention that is paid to 
worship. There are its places of worship, all con- 
structed, as far as possible, with a view to arousing and 
cultivating certain emotions — its churches, basilicas, 
and cathedrals erected on eminences or other conspicu- 
ous sites, with lofty towers and spires pointing heaven- 
ward, with massive walls and lordly pillars, with spacious 
assembly rooms, long-drawn aisles, high ceilings, and 
softly dimmed light, with their far-off, railed-in altars, 
burning candles, and floating incense. All these have a 
meaning that cannot be set forth in mathematics or the 
formulas of science or in the terms of common utilitarian 
purposes, for they tell of movements of the secret soul 
within the man. 

There are its objects of worship. They are many, 
as in polytheism and idolatry, but with a difference. 



42 What Is Christianity? 

Foremost and above all they worship God as one God 
but in three persons — whatever those words may mean — 
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the highest kind 
of worship, known as latria, which we may translate 
"adoration," and is offered to God alone. In this wor- 
ship there is no familiarity, but that deep submission and 
silence of the spirit as it views as from afar the Incom- 
prehensible and Infinite who cannot be known in himself 
but only in his persons or the manifestations of his 
essence. Lower than this worship is dulia, or the service 
and veneration which may be rendered to those lower 
beings whom God has signally honored and through 
whom he manifests a portion of his glories. First of 
these is the Virgin Mary, who receives hyper dulia, or the 
higher veneration given to those who are only less than 
the divine. Saints, or holy men and women, in great 
number are objects of this lower worship and through 
them both prayer and praise are offered to God. When 
the heart, depressed with its sense of sin, fears to enter 
into the divine presence, it turns to those who have 
sinned as we have and yet have been purified and impor- 
tunes their intercessions with God. The demand for 
these mediators is constant in Catholicism, for it seems 
that without them there is a lack of the sense of the 
mercy of God. New saints are being canonized from 
time to time, altars and shrines are being erected to 
them where their votaries may find the blessing of fellow- 
ship with them and their help. From this step easily 
follows the consecration of holy places, holy articles, 
and holy relics which tend to awaken the pious feelings 
of the Catholic votary and to assure him of the divine 
favor. 



Catholicism 43 

In keeping with these are the modes of worship. In 
order to excite the appropriate emotions, statues or 
shrines are erected in honor of the Savior and great saints, 
and before these the devotee prostrates himself or pre- 
sents his offerings in order to find favor and peace. Pic- 
tures are suspended in places of devotion, representing 
the deeds or sufferings of Jesus or Mary or other hallowed 
persons, and by gazing upon these the desired benefit is 
obtained. A similar effect is produced by looking upon 
or touching the relics of saints and martyrs. Or, with- 
out the use of a material image, the soul may be excited 
to high impulse by meditating on the happiness of the 
blest in paradise or the miseries of the wicked in hell or 
of those whose crimes are to be expiated in purgatory. 
Again, a series of devotional acts may be prescribed, such 
as the repetition of a prayer many times in succession, 
perhaps with the help of beads to keep the count. But 
chief of all the methods of arousing the spirit of devotion 
is the performance of sacraments. These cannot be 
spoken of here in detail, but mention may be made par- 
ticularly of the sacrament of the Eucharist with its cul- 
mination in the Mass. The supreme miracle is witnessed 
by the beholder when he sees the Host elevated before 
God as the sublimest act of self-sacrifice and devotion 
and feels that in it Christ is being still offered to God and 
the offering is accepted. So long as the sacrifice of the 
Mass is continued, so long is the soul for whom it is 
offered in the way of salvation. It is quite in keeping 
with this practice that crucifixes are distributed among 
the people in order that the remembrance of the suffering 
of Christ for them may stir their hearts to love and 
gratitude. 



44 What Is Christianity ? 

It is characteristic of the Catholic worship that the 
human and the divine are conceived as brought together, 
not in a natural way — for they are not conceived as 
naturally one — but in a supernatural way. The phi- 
losophy which underlies and supports this view will be 
referred to later. Meanwhile this outstanding feature 
of Catholicism is to be kept in mind. In keeping with 
this the emotions characteristic of Catholic piety fall 
into two main classes, namely, those connected with the 
idea of the divine and those connected with the idea of 
the human. When the human and the divine are con- 
ceived as united, as in Christ, there is excited the feeling 
of tender sympathy and compassion. The human career 
of Jesus abounds in events that invite the worshiper to 
try to imitate his deeds and repeat in himself the very 
emotions that Jesus felt, even in his agonies connected 
with the crucifixion. Here, however, the divine in the 
human is what gives sanctity to the experiences of the 
sufferer and makes them valuable for men. The wor- 
shiper is willing to go the way of the cross with Jesus and 
share his sufferings. Thus the suffering Redeemer God 
becomes the center of devotion: 

O sacred Head now wounded, with grief and shame weighed 

down, 
Now scornfully surrounded with thorns, thy only crown! 
O sacred Head, what glory, what bliss till now was thine! 
Yet, though despised and gory, I joy to call thee mine. 

The unity with Jesus which the Catholic seeks is an 
emotional unity. 

When the divine is regarded as separated from the 
human, it creates the feeling of awe or fear and forebod- 
ing. Thus even Jesus Christ becomes a dread judge 



Catholicism 45 

whose sentence is feared and whom the worshiper seeks 
to placate through the intercessions of Mary and the 
saints. If God is adored as Father, he is not so much 
the Father of men as the First Person of the Holy Trinity, 
the Father of the Son, unknown to any but through the 
Son, and too far away for comfort to flow from the 
thought of him. The Holy Spirit is not so much a joyful 
presence in the soul as the mysterious inspirer and 
renewer, also beyond and away. 

The contemplation of human nature apart from the 
divine excites emotions of unhappiness, self -contempt, 
or revulsion. It is the opposite of the divine, whether, 
as in the Eastern church, it be viewed as the finite, igno- 
rant, erring, and perishable over against the infinitude, 
omniscience, holiness, and immortality of God; or 
whether, as in the Western church, it be viewed more 
particularly as the disobedient, selfish, impure, and guilty 
transgressor of the divine law. Consequently the Cath- 
olic feels that human nature is to be repressed and humil- 
iated, and he may resort to the wearing of filthy garments 
and the neglect or the affliction of his body so as to reduce 
it to subjection to the spirit. Whatever human nature 
may have been at the creation, it is now fallen and cor- 
rupt, and ought to be despised in the presence of the 
divine. 

Thus the Catholic emotional experience oscillates 
between two poles, the sublime contemplation of Deity 
far removed from men and their ways, producing both a 
longing after God and a shrinking from his presence, and 
the dissatisfaction and disgust produced by the con- 
sciousness of human weakness and sin — fitting anticipa- 
tions of the vision of heaven and hell in a world to come. 



46 What Is Christianity? 

This emotional contrast is both the strength and the 
weakness of Catholicism — its strength, because it begets 
in some those all-consuming aspirations which enable 
them to endure the greatest privations and to reach the 
highest achievements in the way of mental concentra- 
tion; its weakness, in that the constant uncertainty and 
vacillation prevent the power of initiative from making 
itself supreme in the life, but leave men ready tools for 
the purposes of others. 

What, then, is the character of Catholic hopes and 
aspirations ? The deep sense of the reality of another 
world, unseen by man and separated from this world by 
a veil that no natural power of human vision can pierce — 
a world whose reality is the opposite of this world, whose 
worth is infinite and eternal in contrast with the fleeting 
and delusive character of the things in this present world 
— issues in the desire and hope of receiving here and now 
some token or sign from that world, some gift of good 
that more than makes up for the loss of all things here. 
Hence the cherishing of belief in voices, visions, dreams, 
apparitions, signs, and omens coming from the better 
world into ours. But the inevitable disappointments 
that must weaken these aspirations lead to a seeking for 
some tangible or visible instrument or vehicle for the 
transmission of the heavenly gifts, and, consequently, 
there arises a superstitious regard for certain places, 
articles, outward acts, days, or seasons that carry with 
them some secret and mysterious blessing. High spirit- 
uality and a low materialism are ill-matched compan- 
ions, but they are commonly found side by side in the 
Catholic type of religion. 



Catholicism 47 

2. CATHOLICISM AS A TYPE OF MORALITY OR A 
FORM OF CONDUCT 

The dualism that is characteristic of the religious 
spirit of Catholicism reappears in its morality, and natu- 
rally so, since morality at its highest is true religion. As 
in Catholic piety there is seen the union of high spiritual- 
istic devotion and a crass materialistic worship, so also 
in its morality, alongside of exclusive devotion to the 
aims that spring out of the sense of the supreme worth 
of the invisible world, there is a place for a low compro- 
mise with sordidness and sensuality. There is room 
both for the ascetic and for the worldling. 

In order to understand Catholic morality we must 
first apprehend its ideal of life. It is suggested by such 
scriptures as the following: "Lay not up for yourselves 
treasures on earth .... but lay up for yourselves treas- 
ures in heaven." "Be not anxious for your life, what ye 
shall eat, or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body 
what ye shall put on." "Seek ye first the kingdom of 
God and his righteousness." "If any man would come 
after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and 
follow me. For whosoever would save his life shall lose 
it and whosoever shall lose his life for my sake shall find 
it." "And every one that hath left houses, or brethren, 
or sisters, or father, or mother, or children, or lands for 
my sake shall receive a hundred fold and shall inherit 
eternal life." "Flesh and blood cannot inherit the 
kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit incor- 

ruption For this corruptible must put on incor- 

ruption and this mortal must put on immortality. But 
when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption and 



48 What Is Christianity? 

this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be 
brought to pass the saying, Death is swallowed up in vic- 
tory." "If ye live after the flesh ye must die, but if 
by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body ye 
shall live." "Set your mind on things above, not on 
things on the earth." Ever before the high Catholic 
imagination there floats the image of "the city that hath 
the foundations whose builder and maker is God," the 
city that is lightened by the glory of God and into which 
"there shall in no wise enter anything unclean." The 
Catholic "saints" are the men and women who have 
abandoned everything for this higher state into which 
they hope to come. 

There can be little doubt that it was the sufferings, 
and especially the martyrdoms, of the early generations 
of Christians that gave this ideal its pre-eminence. Great 
was the exercise of soul through which those devoted 
people succeeded in holding fast to their faith in the pres- 
ence of some awful form of death. The highest exercise 
of faith seemed to appear in the act of renouncing life 
itself. Thus the martyr became the ideal Christian. 
The strain and excitement of those days led to the 
semi-worship of martyrs and the veneration of their 
relics. Paganism and Christianity were fused. Other- 
worldliness became the characteristic Christian virtue, 
and it was especially manifested in the grace of renuncia- 
tion. When times of great prosperity came to the Chris- 
tian community and the growth of worldliness became a 
source of alarm to the purer spirits, there was in conse- 
quence an artificial attempt to preserve the martyr ideal 
and to fulfil it even when there was no persecution of 
men to the death. Where suffering was not compulsorily 



Catholicism 49 

forced upon them from without, it might nevertheless be 
enforced from within. The value of voluntary suffer- 
ing was exalted and salvation was made dependent 
upon it. 

Naturally, therefore, the suffering Savior became the 
example of the highest morality. His renunciation of 
his heavenly glory, his renunciation of the goods of earth, 
his want even of a place to lay his head, his renunciation 
of natural kinships, and, finally, his renunciation, on the 
cross of shame, of his own pure life involved a demand 
upon all his followers that they also should suffer volun- 
tarily — for so did he. The mediaeval Christ was the 
Divine Sufferer and the mediaeval Christian was he who 
suffered with him and for him. Suffering was glorified. 
The meritoriousness of voluntary suffering and the 
cleansing power of penitential suffering became axioms 
of mediaeval ethics. 

The life of the ancient hermit became the real model. 
Retirement from the world, abandonment of its pleas- 
ures and sins, were marks of the highest morality. To 
attain to them human society itself might have to be 
discarded on account of its contaminating influences. 
The monk (the one who lives alone) became the typical 
Christian. Hence the clergy, as holy men, were obliged 
to adopt the monastic ideal. The regular clergy laid 
down the law for the secular clergy. But the secular 
clergy met a double temptation, for while they had to 
contend with the inner impulse that wars against the 
soul, they had the additional inducements to evil that 
come from without. Hence the sternness of the discip- 
line to which they were subjected. A large part of the 
history of the internal affairs of the mediaeval church is 



50 What Is Christianity? 

the story of the effort to carry this policy into effect 
despite the pleadings or recalcitrancy of human nature 
in the priests. They were compelled formally to 
renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil. In the 
course of the long and bitter struggle that the imposition 
of this injunction involved, the emphasis naturally fell 
upon the negative side, and from the eyes of busy men 
whose hands were full of ecclesiastical politics the vision 
of the heavenly world almost disappeared. 

Renunciation, therefore, is the pre-eminent Catholic 
virtue. It has three principal forms, according as the 
natural world, human flesh, or the lordship of Satan may 
be in mind — poverty, chastity, and obedience. This 
trinity of virtues is one and inseparable. They are all 
incumbent on both sexes — for alongside the monk had 
long since appeared the nun, a competitor with him for 
the heavenly reward. They are incumbent on all, but 
not in equal degree, for there are some frail members of 
humanity who can adopt the ideal only in part. Those 
who come short of the full requirement shall have a lower 
place at the time of the heavenly reward. 

The vow of poverty is a judgment passed on the 
striving for earthly wealth and power and the clamor for 
worldly honor. Personal possessions are renounced and, 
like the birds of the sky, man's dependence is placed on 
the gifts of providence and human charity. The monk, 
with his shoeless feet and his begging-bowl, is the emblem 
of this virtue. Poverty of dress and dwelling reveals his 
poverty of spirit. His is the Kingdom of Heaven. The 
mediaeval church had the good sense to perceive that 
this could not be demanded of all and met the weak half- 
way by accepting a partial renunciation of goods in the 



Catholicism 51 

form of gifts to the church, or a limited asceticism in the 
observance of fasts and holy seasons, or a performance 
of penances for errors and misdeeds, or some worthy 
deed in support of the church's enterprises. Those 
things would put them in partial possession of the monk's 
virtues. At times a great wave of popular feeling carried 
multitudes toward a fuller compliance with these de- 
mands. The mediaeval crusades, on their better side, 
were a magnificent tribute to the power which the idea 
of the value of renunciation of earthly good exercised on 
the minds of multitudes in a hard and brutal age. It was 
a time of unparalleled renunciation of external goods for 
the sake of an ideal — though, alas! the ideal was a per- 
version of the true. 

The vow of chastity is a judgment of condemnation 
passed upon the natural appetites and passions. It was 
supported by the Augustinian theory that original sin 
is propagated through concupiscence, which is thereby 
made out to be the root of all sinning. This vow brought 
the ascetic into conflict with his inner nature. The 
battle had to be fought alone. The fight against nature 
was a bitter one, indeed, and was often fought under the 
depressing weight of a soiled conscience. The very 
struggle against the passions seemed to intensify them, 
for passion is strongest when the thoughts are turned 
toward it. Moreover, the struggle against the proclivi- 
ties of the flesh brought men into conflict with the habits 
and feelings that gather around the life of the home and 
find their nourishment within the family circle. But the 
renunciation of the delights and the loves of the home 
was made into a virtue. The home life was put on a 
lower level than the life of the celibate, and marriage 



52 What Is Christianity? 

itself was put under the ban to the extent that it was 
regarded as a sinful relation apart from the sacrament 
which removed the evil of it. Even so, the married man 
and woman were made inferior to the celibates. Mar- 
riage was rather tolerated than honored. The highest 
sanctity could be found only in the state of celibacy. 
The long struggle of the papacy to enforce the law of 
celibacy on the clergy is well known to historians and need 
not detain us here. The excruciating agonies of many 
celibates — their fastings, their flagellations, their tor- 
ments of their bodies by the wearing of such garments as 
hair shirts, perhaps with iron barbs pointing inward, and 
other artificial methods of diverting the thoughts from evil 
imaginations — are familiar; and so also is their failure. 

The human heart must have its recompenses. It 
found them in those days and does so still. Priests, 
deprived of the solace of natural affection, found in the 
Virgin Mary a substitute for a human bride. Nuns, 
robbed of the opportunity to lavish their affections on 
a real human lover or children of their own, pictured 
themselves as the brides of the Lord Jesus and in ministry 
to destitute children found an outflow of tenderness. 
Even so, the natural craving for mutual love remained 
unsatisfied and often broke through its bonds, as the 
story of Abelard and Heloise so forcibly reminds us. 
Moreover, it must be said that the charms of motherhood 
triumphed over the hectic glow of virginity, for the graces 
of Mary that attract the admiration and longing of the 
masses of Catholics do not turn out, when analyzed, to be 
the virtues of celibacy but the graces of motherhood. 
Mary stands for pure motherhood after all, and not for 
a desolate^ virginity. 



Catholicism 53 

The vow of obedience is of even higher rank than the 
vows of poverty and chastity, for as soon as Christianity 
is identified with an ecclesiastical order obedience em- 
braces them both. It stands for the renunciation of 
both intellect and will. It involves assent to the church's 
teachings, compliance with her ritual, and conformity 
with her rules of life. It is the prostration of the whole 
personality before its superior. Its fulfilment would, 
presumably, remove all disorder and rebellion and make 
all revolution impossible. It canonizes the principle 
of order. 

3. CATHOLICISM AS AN INSTITUTIONAL SYSTEM OR 

A CHURCH 

The early days of Christianity were characterized by 
the spontaneity and sense of inspiration which accom- 
pany all great religious revivals. The hazards which 
invariably associate themselves with freedom were 
rapidly multiplied as the new faith spread. The sense 
of inner unity which was sufficient to secure a fair degree 
of coherency among all Christians at first soon became 
an inadequate protection against the tendencies to 
spiritual disintegration and confusion. Some kind of 
government was needed in order that some kind of 
order might be preserved. This need was intensified 
by the sufferings of Christians at the hands of the 
populace and the civil authorities. Leaders competent 
for the task appeared and in time welded together the 
majority of the members of the religious communion into 
a compact organization which succeeded in drawing to 
itself the loyalty of the Christian multitudes and in with- 
standing the grinding persecutions to which from time 



54 What Is Christianity? 

to time believers were subjected. It won the respect of 
the Roman authorities, and finally the farseeing Emperor 
Constantine succeeded in virtually incorporating it with 
the other instruments of the imperial government. 

The churches had now become the church — if we do 
not count the numerous heretics that remained outside 
the new corporation and maintained for a long time a 
vigorous polemic against it. It embodied the Roman 
imperial spirit and naturally took on more and more the 
forms of the Roman administration, though with dif- 
ferent names. When the church divided into an Eastern 
and a Western church, with territorial boundaries follow- 
ing pretty closely the lines of division between the East- 
ern and Western empires, the government of the two 
churches became differentiated according to the types 
of political authority prevailing in the East and the West 
respectively. The Eastern church became an ecclesias- 
tical hierarchy after the aristocratical pattern, with its 
heads in the many metropolitan cities. The Western 
church, with only one great metropolitan center, carried 
the tendency to centralization of authority farther and 
became an ecclesiastical hierarchy after the monarchical 
pattern. There were many fathers, or popes, in the East, 
but only one Father, or Pope, ultimately in the West. 
To us Western people he is known simply as the Pope. 

The course of events through which this development 
was brought about or the study of the actual position of 
the Roman Pope today need not occupy our time now. 
The fact of the evolution and its dependence on the exi- 
gencies which arose with time are the significant things 
which first attract attention, but it is important to 
remember that to the thorough Catholic neither of these 
is of special account or, perhaps, even true. For him the 



Catholicism 55 

church as an organization is essential to Christianity — 
indeed the church and the Kingdom of God, or Chris- 
tianity, are identical. The whole order is of divine 
institution. The works of (pseudo) Dionysius the Areop- 
agite, with their supposed revelation of the heavenly 
hierarchy upon which the earthly hierarchy was pre- 
sumably modeled, succeeded in impressing on the minds 
of the credulous the belief that the church as an institu- 
tion, in the form in which it now exists, is the divine 
institute of salvation. Outside of it there is no Chris- 
tianity. It is an axiom of Catholicism, "Without the 
church is no salvation." 

Christianity is, therefore, in the end a matter of gov- 
ernment. Everything else in it must be interpreted from 
that point of view. The monastic vow of obedience is 
characteristic of the entire system. The whole complex 
of ascetical practices gets its value thence. The peni- 
tential system of the church is a method of administra- 
tion. The ritual is observed as an "office" and its 
features have official validity when observed with a view 
to doing what the church does. That is, official author- 
ity alone can give validity to any act of worship or serv- 
ice. The very virtues and graces which appear in the 
lives of men are real only when they issue from the 
church's administrative acts in sacraments. The doc- 
trines of the church are all essential to salvation because 
assent to them is the condition of participation in the 
church. They are viewed by the Catholics, not as utter- 
ances of truth in itself and for its own sake, but as 
authoritative enactments to which the sacrifice of our 
intellect must be made. In short, the church is an insti- 
tution, divinely ordered in all its forms, to which is com- 
mitted the charge to bring men into the Kingdom of God 



56 What Is Christianity ? 

by her sacraments, so that her sovereignty over the souls 
of men is exercised over the whole of their natural life 
and continues in the case of her members even into the 
world beyond, terminating only at the Judgment Day. 
The great "notes" of the true church — unity, uni- 
versality, apostolicity, holiness — find their true inter- 
pretation here. Unity: the church is one, not because 
of a spiritual experience common to all the members, but 
because she has one sole authority, speaks with one voice, 
and conforms all to one end. Her unity is really uni- 
formity, formal rather than vital. Universality (catho- 
licity) : the church embraces all the saved, not in the 
inclusive sense which we might give to the words by 
saying that wherever there is a saved man there is the 
church, but in the exclusive sense that none is saved ex- 
cept those within the church. Apostolicity: the church 
is formally constituted by divine legislation, in that 
Jesus Christ, true God, committed his power and right 
of government to his apostles and they have transmitted 
it to their successors in the apostolic office without defile- 
ment and without break in continuity to the present, 
and forever. Her rule is unquestionable and absolute. 
Holiness: the church stands apart from, and on a differ- 
ent level from, all other institutions, in that all saving 
grace is deposited in her as an institution. This is not 
to be understood as meaning that all her members are 
actually morally pure, for many are notoriously impure. 
It means that in her sacraments and all her official acts 
there is a mysterious, heavenly quality which effects the 
redemption of all who receive them. Her pope and all 
her priesthood are holy, not in the sense that they are 
truly good men, but as officials. A man might be a bad 



Catholicism 57 

man and be a good priest or a good pope. The efficacy 
of the office in no sense depends on the character of the 
man who officiates in it. Salvation is wholly a matter 
of church. 

4. CATHOLICISM AS A PHILOSOPHY OR BODY OF DOCTRINES 

Catholicism is not so much a philosophy as it is an 
order of life. Its interest in philosophy is secondary. 
For the spirit that governs philosophy is the love of 
truth, and its characteristic activity is inquiry, investi- 
gation, speculation. By contrast, Catholicism is fear- 
some in regard to inquiry and seeks to regulate it in the 
interest of an established order. Its characteristic atti- 
tude of mind is receptiveness, and of will, submission. 

Yet it has a use for philosophy and has never hesi- 
tated to avail itself of the help philosophy can give. It 
resorts to philosophy as a means of vindication rather 
than as a weapon of attack. Its philosophy is apologeti- 
cal in aim, conservative in temper, and suspicious of 
every new movement of thought. Its theology, in con- 
sequence, is opportunist in principle and refrains from 
setting forth an entire system of doctrines (dogmas). 
While it professes to have come into possession of a com- 
plete body of dogmas by tradition, these are held partly 
in reserve, and particular dogmas are announced only as 
occasion calls for them. If one examines the Catholic 
creeds, canons, and decrees, beginning with the Apostles' 
Creed and ending with the encyclical Pascendi Gregis, he 
will find that they seek not so much to furnish the people 
with positive doctrines as to warn them against current 
heresy. The declarations of councils and popes on these 
matters commonly conclude with anathemas. 



58 What Is Christianity? 

While the attitude of Catholicism toward contem- 
porary philosophy has varied from age to age, we may 
say that the relations of early Catholicism with secular 
philosophy were much more intimate than those of later 
Catholicism, when Catholic Christianity had become 
strictly institutional. Early Catholic thought absorbed 
the mystical and metaphysical spirit of the times, while 
later Catholic thought turned to the practical necessities 
of church government. The former sought to vindicate 
the idea of salvation by mysteries (sacraments) and issued 
in a theory of the universe. The latter sought to vindi- 
cate the idea of salvation through the mediating action of 
the church and issued in a theory of the government of the 
world. The two are mingled in Catholic orthodoxy. 

The Catholic theory of the universe is, in brief, that 
there are two worlds, disparate, separate, and distinct. 
They may be variously named — the natural and the 
supernatural, the physical and the spiritual, the earthly 
and the heavenly, the secular and the holy, the temporal 
and the eternal, the human and the divine — according 
to the point of view from which they are considered. In 
the lower of these two worlds darkness, error, sin, and 
death are found; in the higher, light, truth, purity, and 
immortality. Man belongs to the lower, but has long- 
ings for the higher and by redemption may attain to it. 
He is unable of himself to rise to it. For while his facul- 
ties fit him to know the lower world and even to infer 
from it the existence of the Supreme Being in the higher 
world to whom this lower world owes its existence, he is 
unable to know the character of that higher world by 
the exercise of natural powers and, for this, he is depend- 
ent on a supernatural communication. 



Catholicism 59 

At this point the theory of the world becomes a theory 
of revelation and redemption. There come from time 
to time, in ways altogether beyond our finite compre- 
hension, supernatural communications, miraculously 
attested, from this higher world, and with them also 
supernatural bestowments of ineffable power. The 
instruments of these communications are holy, inspired 
men, and particularly selected portions or articles of the 
natural world containing in themselves the mysterious 
potencies which purify and immortalize our souls. He 
who subjects himself to these holy instruments will be 
saved. 

When these mysterious powers became concentrated 
in the hands of a hierarchy possessing the sole right 
to administer them, this early metaphysic became inter- 
twined with a philosophy of human history. This is 
virtually given above in the theory of Catholicism as 
church. It is a theory of government, divine and human. 
The government of the heavenly world is immediately 
by God and his angels, but the government of the earthly 
world is mediate and is ministered through divinely 
ordained and consecrated agencies. These instruments 
of the heavenly government are given authority over 
all natural forms of government and carry out through 
them indirectly the will of heaven, while in the distinc- 
tively supernatural activities on earth the church alone 
has a right to rule. A system of rewards for merit and 
of punishment for sins, valid for this world and the 
heavenly world as well, thereby comes to light and is put 
into execution. This has now come to be the Catholic 
interpretation of Christianity. 



CHAPTER III 
MYSTICISM 

The transition from Catholicism to mysticism seems 
at first so sharp that it is almost as if one had entered 
into a different world. Catholicism stands out against 
the sky-line of life in such massive form that it commands 
the attention and anxious regard even of those who are 
without serious interest in religion. It seeks to lay its 
hand on the helm of human life and to direct all affairs 
down to the smallest details, in order that humanity may 
reach the eternal harbor. It glories in the outward 
marks of greatness and symbols of authority — vast build- 
ings, powerful organizations of men, priests robed in 
splendor, pompous processions, mysterious pantomimes, 
and gorgeous liturgies — all calculated to impress and 
subdue even the most rebellious. It shrinks not from 
calling upon armies and navies to do battle for its cause 
and to destroy its foes. It has gone so far as to seek to 
divide the territories of the earth among its faithful 
servants. 

Mysticism, on the contrary, loves retirement. It 
seeks to dwell within the secret recesses of the soul. It 
cherishes secluded and lonely places where it may give 
itself to meditation and aspiration undisturbed. It stig- 
matizes worldly ambition and worldly power as vain, 
and cherishes instead the inner contemplation and vision 
of the heavenly. It scorns material and fleshly things 
while it revels in the unseen and worships in the spirit. 

60 



Mysticism 61 

Catholicism and mysticism seem to be in direct antith- 
esis. On closer analysis, however, it may turn out 
that there comes into view such a close affinity between 
them that we are unable any longer to regard mysticism 
merely as a reaction against Catholicism, but to see in it 
one of the chiefest supports of that great system. At any 
rate, many famous mystics have found their home in the 
Catholic church. 

The word "mystic" is connected with the Greek word 
which is transliterated "mystery" in English and, like 
it, is derived from a root meaning " to close or shut." A 
mystery is something hidden or secret. Among the 
Greeks there were secret religious orders whose members 
were initiated by submitting to ceremonies unknown to 
outsiders and by which they were supposed to become 
the recipients of a species of higher enlightenment and 
thus to enter into oneness of life with the divinity in 
whose name these ceremonies were observed. The door 
to this higher light was closed to the uninitiated. In 
the course of time the term mysticism has become 
detached from any necessary connection with the observ- 
ance of secret ceremonies. Anyone may now be called 
a mystic who claims to have received into the secrecy of 
his spirit a higher knowledge than can be imparted by 
the ordinary methods of intelligence. The term mysti- 
cism may be used as descriptive of this attitude of mind, 
or, more properly, of the theory that supports it. 

One might ask, Does mysticism as a state of mind 
spring from the ancient Mysteries ? It may be that the 
theory of insight which bears the name of mysticism 
among Christians is one of the consequences of introdu- 
cing the practices of the Mysteries into early Christian 



62 What Is Christianity? 

communities; but these Mysteries themselves are rooted 
deeply in that sense of awe and ignorance that comes 
over men everywhere, in crude civilizations and in the 
most refined, when they face the baffling problem of the 
meaning of the world. The Inexplicable stares at man 
on every hand, and the deep depression which he feels 
in the face of it begets a reaction in his soul. He struggles 
to gain by one grand leap into the unknown the possession 
of those eternities which he seeks in vain by the slow and 
laborious processes of piecemeal study. 

Does mysticism, then, stand for a religious view of 
things ? Not in the narrow sense of religion as faith in a 
higher person. But in that looser sense of religion which 
denotes the souPs commitment to the highest meaning 
of all reality it is descriptive of a type of religion. Indeed, 
the thoroughgoing mystic would hold that mysticism is 
the essence of all religion and contains the hidden truth 
in all religions. All else is incidental or secondary for 
him. Christian mysticism claims to be the true and 
final interpretation of Christianity. 

The true mystic devotes himself supremely to the 
cultivation of what he calls the inner life. Now, inas- 
much as every kind of religion is rooted ultimately in 
some quality of the human spirit, mysticism is very 
intimately related to religion universally and may be 
affiliated with any and every kind. Mystics everywhere 
have an inner likeness to one another, but they are likely 
to differ as the religions with which they are connected 
differ from one another. The Christian mystic and the 
Mohammedan mystic will be mutually sympathetic, but 
each of them will bear some of the special characteristics 
of his religious connections. Similarly with regard to 



Mysticism 63 

the mystics of other faiths. Mysticism may suffer modi- 
fication according to the kind of positive religion with 
which it may be associated, but it seeks to find the ulti- 
mate in all religions. It tries to penetrate to that which 
underlies all the different religions and also to transcend 
them and melt their many colors in the pure, white light 
of perfect truth. Their worship, their social customs, 
their organizations, their creeds, are only symbols of that 
which is higher than they, only temporary resting-places 
for the human spirit as it rises to the height of that 
supreme experience when it is one with the ultimate 
reality — whatever these words may mean. If, then, 
mysticism is religion, it is also more than religion, in the 
common sense of that term. It is that out of which 
religion rises and that in which religion culminates. So, 
at least, its advocates in substance affirm. 

This is not the same as to reduce all religions to the 
one level. All religions have their symbols by which 
they seek to express the ultimate truth to which they 
strive to attain, but some of them reach up vastly higher 
than others and minister more effectually to the soul's 
progress. Mysticism does not reject the supremacy of 
Christianity among religions unless it find some other 
faith that brings the soul nearer to its goal. Mysticism 
may profess to be the true interpretation of Christianity 
and therewith the final interpretation of all religions. 

It is possible to distinguish different types of mysti- 
cism according as they accentuate this or that function 
of the human spirit. Their interpretations of Chris- 
tianity will differ correspondingly. There is what we may 
call an aesthetic mysticism, which exalts the worth of the 
feeling experience. As the material world around us 



64 What Is Christianity? 

communicates itself to us through our physical senses, so 
also through the higher sensibility the world of higher 
being registers itself upon our receptive spirituality and 
emancipates us from bondage to the things of physical 
sense. As the painter looking upon a scene in nature 
rinds that it reflects itself upon his soul in a manner 
unknown to the mere physicist or biologist, and as he 
tries to reveal his secret to his fellows by the magic 
strokes of his brush; as the musician catches rhythms 
and detects harmonies in the universe which remain 
unrecorded by the fkiest and most sensitive instruments 
known to science because they belong to a different order 
of sensation, so the spirit of the mystic as it lies open to 
the impress of the spiritual world feels floating into itself 
that Reality of all existence which eye hath not seen and 
ear hath not heard but which the Infinite Spirit conveys 
to our higher sensibility. In this "absolute sensation," 
as it has been called, that whole of reality of which only 
fragments are disclosed to the artist and the musician 
comes to us in an instant. Then are we at rest. Then 
are we satisfied. Such a mysticism, if professedly Chris- 
tian, would interpret Christianity as the religion of pure, 
simple, unalloyed, perfect feeling, the religion of perfect 
peace. 

There is a speculative mysticism, a mysticism based 
on the primacy of thought. "I think," said the great 
Descartes, " therefore I am." Thought possessed, for 
him, the solution of the riddle of the universe. The 
great speculative and psychological movements of the 
last three centuries are a modern tribute to the greatness 
of thought. Socrates and Plato and Aristotle virtually 
said the same of old when they sought to disclose its 



Mysticism 65 

mysterious powers to their hearers. Logicians have 
sought to unfold the immanent order in it. Idealist 
philosophers have sought to construct a universe for our 
human intelligence under its sole imperial authority. 
"My God, I think thy thoughts after thee," said a votary 
of thought. There is an Absolute Thought which is the 
truth of all our individual thinking and the guaranty 
of its trustworthiness, say many. Who has not felt a 
mighty inspiration as he discovers that he can enter into 
this thought-universe and make it his own? Yet the 
processes of our actual thinking are often slow and falter- 
ing. Our best reasoning is precarious at times. The 
axioms of an earlier generation may be a source of 
skepticism in a later. Science proceeds by means of 
regular processes, but she splits up the world of our 
thinking into sections and places an interrogation point 
after everything. Nothing is settled hereby. Even 
idealistic philosophy proceeds to the discovery of its 
Absolute by the slow and involved method of construing 
it through its self-revelation in the relative and manifold. 
But mysticism professes to know the Absolute from 
within and by immediate communion with the Totality 
of all things. 

There is also an ethical mysticism, a mysticism that 
professes identity with the Absolute Will. The theory 
reposes on the consciousness of moral compulsion which 
is felt so mightily by some people. In all ages and among 
all peoples there have been persons who took a path in 
life all their own, defying, perchance, hoary traditions 
and sacred customs and even setting their own will 
against the weight of the world, because they felt they 
could do no other. These people say that a voice 



66 What Is Christianity? 

within, like the daemon of Socrates, speaks to them in 
great crises of their lives, saying, "This is the way; walk 
thou in it." They are found in the greatest numbers at 
turning-points of human history and they prove to be 
rallying-centers for men of less firm conviction; or they 
bring terror to their friends and wrath upon themselves 
by a stubborn adherence to a sense of duty that often 
seems unreasonable to others and of which they can give 
no reasoned account to themselves. They have heard 
the Voice and that is enough for them. When such an 
attitude of mind is treated as a philosophic principle 
grounding an ethical interpretation of the world, we 
have ethical mysticism. Kant's great doctrine of the 
Categorical Imperative, the absolute dictum of the self- 
legislative practical reason, the moral law which demands 
its own fulfilment and refuses to be identified with any 
particular or empirical act, is an instance of this ethical 
mysticism. 

Summing up the results of our study thus far we can 
say: There is a tendency to mysticism in all men, but 
the strength of it varies in different peoples and different 
individuals. Men commonly experience uprisings of 
feeling that carry them on irresistibly toward some end 
which they would never have deliberately chosen; or 
they have intuitions of unseen things, visions of higher 
worlds, anticipations of coming events, which hold their 
minds enchained and with which they would not part, 
though there may seem no way of proving the truth of 
these foregleams; or they experience the constraining 
power of some greater personality or higher will, and the 
bondage to it is dearer to them than liberty itself. When 
the attempt is made to unfold a philosophy on such a 



Mysticism 67 

basis we have genuine mysticism. Mysticism, then, 
is a philosophy. It is a philosophy that aspires to be a 
religion by securing for men the high results that religion 
seeks. If, in the narrower view of it, we may call it a 
philosophy of religion, it is a philosophy of religion that 
takes the mystical element in religion and attempts to 
treat that as the essence of all religions. 

As a philosophy mysticism has a threefold aspect: 
first, it is a theory of knowledge; secondly, it is a theory 
of existence; thirdly, it is a theory of life. In each of 
these it has a positive and a negative side. (1) As a 
theory of knowledge, negatively, it points out the limita- 
tions of the methods of logic and of science. Neither an 
analysis of the processes of thought nor a synthesis of 
particulars can lead us beyond the partial and incom- 
plete. The All, the Totality, the Infinite, lie beyond 
and cannot be approached by the dissection of present 
knowledge or by adding portion to portion. Agnosticism 
and despair can be avoided only by renouncing the pride 
of intellect and laying one's soul open to the Infinite. 
Then, positively, we know the All because it has become 
our very self. (2) As a theory of existence it denies 
the reality of things perceived by sense, because these are 
only transient. Only that which forever is, truly is. 
The particular objects we know are only the notes in an 
eternal harmony. The separate notes are nothing in 
themselves, and as long as we think of them we never 
catch the tune. The notes are lost in the tune. That 
alone remains. (3) As a theory of lif e, mysticism seeks to 
raise men above legalism and tradition with their atten- 
tion to specific acts, by which no man can be saved, and 
to lead them to the absolute surrender which puts one in 



68 What Is Christianity? 

possession of the power of the Infinite Will. Then only 
have we attained. Then only are we saved from the love 
of the changing and temporary. Then only are we 
delivered from the passions and aims that feed on the 
things which pass away. 

Without pursuing the general study of mysticism 
farther we may now point out more specifically the inter- 
pretation it puts upon Christianity. We shall begin 
the examination of Christian mysticism by indicating 
the degree of prominence it obtains in the whole Chris- 
tian movement and then proceed to indicate its out- 
standing characteristics, its method, and, finally, its 
strength and its weakness as a spiritual movement. 

I. THE APPEARING OF MYSTICISM IN HISTORICAL 
CHRISTIANITY 

Mysticism as a philosophy of the Christian religion 
finds ample footing in the faith of the early communities 
of believers. The earliest believers, being mostly Jews 
or proselytes, naturally carried with them into the new 
faith the deep regard for dreams, trances, visions, and 
apparitions which remained over in Judaism after divina- 
tion, soothsaying, and witchcraft had been put under 
the ban. Through these abnormal experiences messages 
came to them, sometimes from the mouths of angel visi- 
tants and sometimes directly from their God, conveying 
an intelligence of things in a higher realm than could 
be reached by the common mind of men. There were 
ecstatic experiences when the subject was carried into the 
heavenly world and heard and saw unspeakable things. 
The Jewish prophetic inspiration — the sense of being the 
instrument of the Spirit of the Lord, the consciousness 



Mysticism 69 

of an inward burden of the Lord and of the possession 
of a foresight of things to come — was cherished and inten- 
sified in Christians. The range of this gift was greatly 
widened so as to be enjoyed by multitudes of common 
believers if not by all of them. These things and the 
extraordinary powers that accompanied them were 
looked upon as marks of the special favor of God. Mys- 
tical utterances of a profound order occur not infre- 
quently in the Hebrew and Jewish Scriptures, especially 
in the later pre-Christian days: "As the hart panteth 
after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, 

God." "Cast me not away from thy presence and 
take not thy Holy Spirit from me." "My soul waiteth 
in silence for God only." "He that dwelleth in the 
secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow 
of the Almighty." "Whither shall I go from thy Spirit 
and whither shall I flee from thy presence?" "When 

1 awake, I am still with thee." These sayings relate to 
spiritual states that do not seem capable of being placed 
under the action of the logical intelligence. 

The New Testament abounds in mystical utterances. 
The Synoptic Gospels ascribe some of them to Jesus: 
"Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God." 
"Blessed art thou .... for flesh and blood hath not 
revealed it unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven." 
"No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth 
any know the Father, save the Son and he to whom the 
Son willeth to reveal him." Jesus himself is said to have 
assured his disciples that he would be a mystical presence 
with them: "Where two or three are gathered together 
in my name, there am I in the midst of them." The 
tendency to emphasize these experiences grew with the 



70 What Is Christianity? 

accession of converts from the Graeco-Roman peoples, 
who brought with them into the Christian communion a 
vague yearning and reverence for the secret and ineffable 
in life, and they naturally viewed the Christian message 
and the accompanying rites as bringing these to men in a 
fuller sense than had ever been known before. Paul has 
much to say to his Greek readers on the theme of the 
higher knowledge obtained through the Spirit of Christ, 
which was to him the same as the Spirit of God. One 
or two quotations here must suffice: "We speak a wisdom 
not of this world, God's wisdom in a mystery, even the 
wisdom that hath been hidden. Things which eye saw 
not and ear heard not, God hath revealed unto us through 
the Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the 
deep things of God." This inward illumination of Paul's 
became the very presence of the Son of God within him: 
"It pleased God to reveal his Son in me I con- 
ferred not with flesh and blood." The experience was 
one that transformed his very being. "We all with 
unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the 
Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory 
to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit." These 
experiences were to him revelations of abiding realities 
in contrast with the passing things of this world: "We 
look not at the things that are seen but at the things 
that are not seen; for the things that are seen are tem- 
poral, but the things that are not seen are eternal." 

The mystical tendency is greatly accentuated in the 
Johannine writings and in the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
The heavenly and the earthly stand apart; the latter at 
best is only a symbol of the former. Similarly also as 
respects flesh and spirit, God and man or the world: 



Mysticism 7 1 

"That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which 
is born of the spirit is spirit." "Men loved the darkness 
rather than the light." "He that is of the earth is of the 
earth and of the earth he speaketh : he that cometh from 
heaven is above all." " Ye are of this world ; I am not of 
this world." The things of the earth are only "copies of 
the things in the heavens" at best, and not the heavenly 
things themselves. The former are the "things that are 
shaken" and will be removed, while the latter cannot be 
shaken, but remain forever. Correspondingly, there is a 
higher enlightenment, even an enlightenment that makes 
men one with God: By faith men "endure as seeing him 
who is invisible." They come to the heavenly city and to 
God himself. "Ye have an unction from the Holy One 

and ye know all things Ye need not that any one 

teach you." "We are of. God: he that knoweth God 
heareth us." Here is the life of supreme love. "He 
that loveth is begotten of God and knoweth God." The 
new birth, the new knowledge, the love of God, are all 
one. In this believers are made one with God and Christ: 
" If a man love me he will keep my word; and my father 
will love him, and we will come unto him and make our 
abode with him." There is a penetration of their being 
with Christ and God. "I in them and thou in me, that 
they may be perfected into one." Here appears, at 
least on first glance, the realization of the mystical long- 
ing. Passages of such import as the foregoing might be 
indefinitely multiplied. Mysticism sees in them the 
utterance of the very essence of the Christian religion. 
While the mystical expressions of the New Testament 
retain the strong moral coloring of the Jewish faith, the 
ethical spirit is much less manifest in the mysticism of 



72 What Is Christianity ? 

the ancient Catholic church and at times seems to fall 
entirely away. When the Christian communion became 
gentile and began to naturalize itself in the world, the 
sluices by which the mingling types of spiritual life in the 
Graeco-Roman world flowed into it were thrown wide 
open, with the result that the mystical tendencies in 
early Christianity asserted themselves with increasing 
strength and took on more and more the character of the 
non-ethical spiritual yearnings of the age. Then, too, 
the more the church found itself in organized opposition 
to the secular power of Rome the more deeply her com- 
municants felt that their ideal must be the purely spirit- 
ual and the more it needed a mystical interpretation of 
the universe as a support. Several types of mysticism 
became prominent. 

In Montanism the heated and florid Phrygian imagi- 
nation was fired by the idea that in the bestowal of the 
Paraclete by Christ the summit of spiritual possibility 
lay open to all those who would obey the law of its impar- 
tation. By ecstatic experience, furthered by the ascetic 
life, the human spirit could become identical with the 
Holy Spirit and able to utter truth that transcended the 
teachings of the Christian tradition as much as these 
transcended the Jewish law. These utterances could 
be subjected to no outer test, but carried their authority 
in themselves. Absolute prophetic inspiration was ob- 
tained. 

In the movement known as Gnosticism, that threat- 
ened to make the Christian gospel a revealed philosophy 
and the Christian church a pagan mystery-society, there 
was an effort to unite the faith in the divine saviorhood 
of Christ with a speculative cosmology and systems of 



Mysticism 73 

secret initiations that introduced men to the ultimate 
knowledge that would redeem them from the delusions 
of materiality and the sins that issued from error, and 
would impart to them the bliss of becoming an organ of 
divinity. On account of the immoral pagan practices 
associated with it and on account of its nullification of 
the real character of many Christian traditions, it was 
rejected by the church, but its power was not overthrown. 
In the revived Platonism represented by such great 
thinkers as Plotinus and Porphyry the inner spirit of 
Gnosticism was restored and became the very nerve of 
the Christian dogma. In the neo-Platonic system there 
was a theory of the origin of the material world through a 
descending series of emanations from the One (God) that 
is above all existence, and a theory of the re-ascent of the 
human soul to that supreme region from which it origi- 
nated, till it is again one with God, "the alone with the 
Alone." This is made out to be the Christian redemp- 
tion. This is the theory that, in its essence, underlies 
the dogma of the two natures of Christ and the Trinity. 
Hence we may say that in the ancient creeds and the 
ritual that was inseparable from them mysticism received 
its christening and became established in the right of 
Christian citizenship. 

The great Augustine in his speculations and medi- 
tations took up the parable of mysticism. By inter- 
weaving it into his own profound spiritual experiences, 
the activities of the Catholic church, the Christian Scrip- 
tures of the Old and New Testaments, and the great 
conception of history as unfolding the fulfilment of a 
universal divine government, he secured for mysticism a 
dominating influence in the church of the West. In the 



74 What Is Christianity? 

mediaeval Western church the mystical tendency became 
prolific in producing great spiritual struggles and enter- 
prises. It fostered the spirit of protest against the 
worldliness and corruption of the Roman church and 
stirred up rebellion against her authority. It awoke into 
speculative inquiry great theologians, like Hugo and 
Richard de St. Victor, Bonaventura, and Thomas 
Aquinas, and laid the foundation of modern Catholic 
orthodoxy. It created free religious associations of men 
in various countries for the cultivation of an independent 
piety. It helped to arouse the zeal of preachers like 
St. Bernard, ecclesiastics like Hildebrand, saints like 
Francis. It helped pave the way for the Protestant 
Reformation. The quietism of Madame Guyon and 
the warm piety of Catholic Modernists are evidences of 
its survival in Catholicism. 

Mysticism has had a large place in Protestantism. 
The " inner word" of the Anabaptists, outranking and 
interpreting the written or outer word, the all-sufficient 
" faith" of Luther, the "secret witness of the Spirit" of 
Calvin and his followers, the " spiritual universe" of 
Boehme, the " inner light" that George Fox and the 
Quakers recognized in the soul of every man, the "soul 
liberty" of the Baptists, the " heart-religion" of the 
Pietists and Moravians, the "perfect love" of the 
Wesleyans, the "visions" of Swedenborg, and the zeal 
of the numerous present-day religious bodies profess- 
ing a higher knowledge, all bear testimony to the 
continuance of the mystical temper in great force 
among Protestants. It is reflected in not a few of 
the hymns in popular use among the Protestant 
churches. The neo-Platonic character of two familiar 



Mysticism 75 

modern hymns may be exhibited by quoting a stanza 
from each: 

Eternal Light ! eternal Light ! 

How pure the soul must be, 
When, placed within thy searching sight, 
It shrinks not, but with calm delight 

Can live and look on thee! 
And 

Breathe on me, breath of God! 

Until my heart is pure, 
Until with thee I will one will 

To do or to endure. 

2. OUTSTANDING CHARACTERISTICS OE CHRISTIAN 

MYSTICISM 

a) The spirit of Christian mysticism is both critical 
and speculative. It is critical because it aims at sim- 
plicity and directness in religion. Feeling that in the 
Christian faith religion comes to perfection, it finds that 
perfection in the immediacy of the soul's relation to God. 
The Christian soul finds itself in God and God in itself. 
God is nearer than all else to the soul, the life of its life, 
and hence there can be no need of mediation between the 
soul and God. Whatever may come between them brings 
darkness and not light. All that lies beyond this inward 
union is secondary, and if it tend to obscure or interfere 
with the soul's consciousness of its God it is of no account 
or worse than useless. Hence the indifference which 
thoroughgoing Christian mystics commonly feel toward 
the mere externals of religion. Hence the attempt to pen- 
etrate through the traditions, the customs, the ceremonies, 
the forms of organization, and all the other drapery of 
historical Christianity and to discover the eternal essence 



j6 What Is Christianity ? 

that lies concealed behind it all. It seeks to realize here 
on earth the religious experience which men hope for in 
heaven. But in discovering the essence of Christianity 
it becomes necessarily speculative. For if it is in Jesus 
Christ that men find their final salvation, then it is in 
him that this immediacy with God is found. It then 
becomes impossible to escape the task of relating this 
experience Christward with the experience Godward in 
such a way that the two become one. This calls for the 
profoundest religious speculation and creates the very 
dogmas whose interpolation into the relation between 
the soul and God obscures the immediacy of the divine 
enlightenment. Yet against these very dogmas mys- 
ticism voices a protest. 

b) The spirit of Christian mysticism is both individ- 
ualistic and universalistic. The mystic is interested in 
the movements of his own soul. The ancient Christian 
mystics were the fathers of the modern psychology of 
religion. They it was who taught us to analyze and 
estimate the worth of our inner experiences of conflict, 
defeat, and victory and to perceive in those battlefields 
hidden from the view of the mere outsider the greatest 
tragedies and triumphs in the story of all the worlds. It 
was they who discovered in the inner recesses of man's 
soul the highest working of those mighty forces that 
constitute the universe. Is it any wonder that a Bernard 
of Clairvaux should traverse the passes of the Alps sur- 
rounded by scenes of the most marvelous beauty and 
grandeur without uttering a single word that would indi- 
cate that these things made any lasting impression on his 
mind ? For his eye was turned inward to contemplate 



Mysticism 77 

those vaster scenes, of which the grandest natural 
scenery could be only a sensuous reflection, in which he 
stood nearer to the ultimate Sublime and Beautiful in 
the presence of which all the things of sense shrank away 
abashed. 

In the life of the soul the Christian mystic sees the 
final word of the Christian revelation. Without it the 
Christian Scriptures would be only childish prattle. In 
the living soul he has found the pearl of great price. The 
gospel stories of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the 
Lost Son are parables of the wanderings of the soul from 
its true self and its coming to itself again. The mystic's 
Christ is not a historic human individual, but the 
Indwelling One. For him the essence of the distinctive 
Christian revelation is found to be, " Christ in me. " For 
him the essence of the Christian redemption is expressed 
in the words, "I have been crucified with Christ; and it 
is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me." For 
him the essence of all Christian activity is expressed in 
the consciousness, "Not I, but the grace of Christ which 
was with me." In other words, he is persuaded that in 
examining his own spirit-life he is using a plumb line that 
reaches down to the depths of Christ, of God. 

Here we are reminded that the ultimate secret of the 
mystic's interest in the individual soul lies in his hope of 
finding there a Something More than himself, the Soul 
of all souls, in which or in whom all souls are first lost to 
themselves and afterward find themselves again. What 
better lot, he asks, can fall to a man than that he should 
lose his own narrow, empirical self in the Infinite Self ? 
Thus it is true that he who loses his soul in this world 



78 What Is Christianity? 

shall keep it to life eternal. Why should anyone wish 
to preserve to himself a self -existence which is after all 
only a selfish existence? The worth of the individual 
lies, not in the fact that he is an individual, but in the 
truth that when he truly finds himself the Universal is 
all the Self he desires. 

c) Christian mysticism seeks the attainment of pure 
spirituality, but is inseparably united with materiality. 
In common with all other mystics, the Christian mystic 
is powerfully conscious of the opposition between the 
spirit and the flesh in man and between spirituality 
and materiality in the universe that reflects the soul 
of man. He seeks the transformation of his whole 
being into spiritual existence and the transmutation 
of the whole of existence into a spiritual world. The 
Christian mystic's heaven is a condition of existence that 
may be defined as " the spirits of just men made perfect/' 
It will be a condition of pure spiritual love. If he loves 
others, if he loves himself, it is for the sake of the love of 
God, that is, for a purely spiritual love, a love which is 
unconnected with physical relations. The holy city for 
which he looks is a heavenly city, which is lighted and 
filled with God. He sings of that city alone and is 
interested in no other. He pines for that city and is 
willing to forego all earthly joys and comforts for its dear 
sake. How vain and worthless are all earthly cities and 
their wealth ! Bernard's great hymn, "Hora Novissima," 
done into English by J. M. Neale under the title, "The 
Celestial Country," is a sustained, unwearied (however 
wearying to modern people) recital of the glories of 
that spiritual state in contrast with the deep pessimism 
it exhibits in regard to this world. The verse most 



Mysticism 79 

familiar to Protestants may be inserted here to represent 
the mystical contemplation of heaven: 

Jerusalem the golden, 

With milk and honey blest, 
Beneath thy contemplation 

Sink heart and voice oppressed; 
I know not, O, I know not, 

What social joys are there; 
What radiancy of glory! 

What light beyond compare! 

As we follow the course of the poet's contemplation we 
are impressed with his failure to shake off the pressure 
of materiality. For almost the whole of his imagery is 
drawn from scenes of natural, physical life and material 
prosperity. It is the same with those women mystics 
of the Middle Ages who believed that they had cast off all 
other love for the sake of the love of Christ, the Bride- 
groom of their souls. The saints whom they picture to 
themselves in glory are bedecked in the very millinery 
whose earthly counterpart they had presumably driven 
from their hearts. The simple truth of the matter is that 
Christian mysticism has never succeeded in shaking off 
the wholesome Christian appreciation of the worth of 
material reality. If mysticism only recognizes spiritual 
good, it is, nevertheless, unable to represent it except in 
terms of material good. 

3. THE METHOD OF CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM 

It would seem at first that it must be quite out of 
place to speak of a method of mysticism. For the mys- 
tical experience, being ineffable, cannot be brought under 
a consistent mode of expression; since it bears its author- 
ity within itself it cannot be made to rest upon a law of 



80 What Is Christianity? 

action or occurrence; since it wells up from the secret 
depths of the subliminal self or comes down from a higher 
self no attempt to secure it by human efforts can hope 
for steady success. As soon as it is brought under an 
order of things it loses its distinctive excellence. Never- 
theless, mystics have been insistent that the experience 
is obtainable and have sought carefully to offer guidance 
to the seeking soul. This is inevitable as soon as it is 
admitted that the experience is desirable and satisfying. 
There is a method in mysticism. The method of Chris- 
tian mysticism does not differ from the method of mys- 
ticism in general except in so far as the virtues cherished 
in Christianity take on a character of their own and in so 
far as the object of Christian adoration is distinctive. 

First of all, the would-be participant in the mystical 
experience must submit to a discipline of the will. This 
is twofold, having a negative side and a positive side. 
On the negative side there must be a withdrawal of the 
will from aims that divert it from obtaining unity with 
the ultimate Reality; there must be a withdrawal of the 
attention of the intellect from the mere becoming of 
things in order to the attainment of the vision of God; 
there must be an alienation of the emotions from things 
that belong to the artificial world of common life. In 
other words, the true mystic must be an ascetic. As 
Peter Damiani said, " Whoever would reach the summit 
of perfection should keep within the cloister of his seclu- 
sion, cherish spiritual leisure, and shudder at traversing 
the world, as if he were about to plunge into a sea of 
blood. For the world is so filthy with vices that any 
holy mind is befouled even by thinking about it." This 
is the extreme Catholic view of the matter. The differ- 



Mysticism 81 

ence between the Catholic mystic and the Protestant 
mystic is, at this point, one of degree. Evelyn Under- 
hill says: "As the purified sense, cleansed of prejudice 
and self-interest, can give us fleeting communications 
from the actual broken-up world of duration at our 
gates : so the purified and educated will can wholly with- 
draw the self's attention from its usual concentration on 
small useful aspects of the time-world, refuse to react to 
its perpetually incoming messages, retreat to the unity 
of its spirit, and there make itself ready for messages from 
another plane." This also is asceticism. 

The positive side of the discipline is the more impor- 
tant. The Nay is only a passageway to the Yea. After 
the will, by withdrawal, renunciation, and mortification, 
has received its purgation, there begins its concentration 
upon the sole end of its exercise. "Tension, ardor, are 
of its essence; it demands the perpetual exercise of indus- 
try and courage." Beginning with meditation, the soul 
presses upward through successive stages of contempla- 
tion till at last it beholds with unblenched eye the Light 
Eternal. In this "naked contemplation" the poem of 
existence is read at last. The heart dwells in the eternal 
Love, selfhood is lost in the divine Quiet, and God is All 
in all. The strenuousness of the demands of mysticism 
is excelled by no type of religion or morality. 

In Christian mysticism Jesus frequently becomes the 
center of the mystical striving. He is the souPs Bride- 
groom and the highest bliss is found in the ecstatic union 
with him. His cross, particularly, becomes the focal 
point of the contemplation of his glory until the worshiper 
becomes emotionally one with him, until "with him we 
will one will to do or to endure" and die to self in him. 



82 What Is Christianity ? 

Secondly, the discipline of the will is supported by a 
method of interpretation. It may be called symbolism. 
It has been shown that for mysticism the world of sense- 
perception is not the truly real world. Its value, how- 
ever, is not merely negative. It has the value of the 
stamp on the gold coin. It tells of the Reality, or 
that which is beyond itself. It symbolizes the truth 
and only so far has it truth. The universe is a song, 
a psalm. The world of perception is the musical scale. 
It is not enough to know the notes. We most catch 
the music by the inner ear. The notation mediates 
it to us. The Maker of the world is an Artist. 
Science is worthful only as it leads to the cultivation 
of the Art divine. 

A special application of this. theory occurs in the 
mystical use of the Christian Scriptures. Allegorism 
is the true method of their interpretation. Behind the 
grammatical sense of the Scriptures lies the hidden sense. 
Consequently, questions of literary criticism or historical 
fact have a very subordinate interest, if any interest 
whatsoever. Often the mystical interpretation has been 
carried to the greatest extravagance. The Song of 
Solomon is one of the favorite hunting-grounds of 
allegorical interpreters. We are all familiar with the 
play of fancy in the use of apocalyptical works for pur- 
poses of " spiritual edification." Especially significant 
is the attitude assumed toward the historical Jesus — the 
outer events of his life, or his actual teachings, matter 
little. The heavenly Christ alone concerns the mystic. 
With this Christ he holds communion. This Christ 
reveals himself still to believers, and this Christ alone can 
save — he is God. 



Mysticism 83 

Thirdly, mystical piety is nourished by a method of 
emotional cultivation. The search for symbols mediat- 
ing the longed-for experience issues in the selection or 
creation of them. Mysticism always develops a ritual. 
Mystics are the most at home in the ritualistic churches. 
For the attempt to sustain the high elevation of soul 
which is called union with God is bound to slacken and 
fall back unless means be taken to revive the sagging ex- 
perience as frequently as may be. Otherwise indifference 
or despair must follow. Hence the ritual, hence the 
sacraments, hence the elaborate system of symbols which 
have gradually grown up in the Catholic church. Mys- 
ticism frequently eventuates in what seemed at first its 
opposite — Catholicism. 

4. THE STRENGTH AND THE WEAKNESS OF MYSTICISM 
IN CHRISTIANITY 

This can be discerned by recalling the circumstances 
under which the phenomena of mysticism have been 
most in evidence. Mysticism has been frequently the 
resort of the physically weak and oppressed. When 
governments have become despotic and have crushed 
weaker states to the ground or have deprived their sub- 
jects of their liberties ; when worldly power has been put 
into the hands of the rich and the common people have 
been subjected to impoverishment and cruelty, then the 
hopelessness of their material condition has turned the 
minds of men to the better hope of a higher enrichment 
by participation in the realities of a spiritual world over 
which material forces have no control and for the posses- 
sion of which a man is not dependent on the suffrages of 
his fellows. Here mysticism appears as an affirmation 



84 What Is Christianity? 

of the reality and worth of the spiritual over against the 
vanity of the material, and, at the same time, as a vindi- 
cation of the indefeasible prerogative of the individual 
human spirit. Thus it was when the power of ancient 
Rome threatened the liberties and life of the weaker 
peoples. The mysticism of ancient Catholicism is in 
part an answer to the claims of the Empire. 

Mysticism has been not infrequently the support of 
dissenters against ecclesiastical despotism. In times 
of organized religious aggrandizement, when priestly 
authorities, with apparent success, have sought to 
usurp the control of spiritual functions; when a stately 
or attractive ritual has emerged as a means of satisfying 
spiritual wants; when, in consequence, formalism and 
pomp have been substituted for the gentle graces of true 
religion; and when the pride of sacerdotalism has been 
flanked by dependence, ignorance, and grossness in the 
masses, then mysticism has arisen as a mighty reaction. 
It has called men back to the simplicity of the truly 
spiritual life, its freedom from external control, its inde- 
pendence of material support, its supremacy over all 
outer authority, its immediacy of access to the individual 
man. Religion is affirmed to be an inward life and not 
a system of worship or an order of society. Thus it was 
when the mediaeval dissenters rose in revolt against the 
claims of the mighty mediaeval Catholic church. 

Mysticism, again, has sprung up in protest against 
the pretensions of intellectual despotism in the life of 
religion. When the truth of religious faith has been 
subjected to intellectual analysis or theoretical specula- 
tion; when the possession of this faith has been identified 
with acquiescence in the truth of formal propositions or 



Mysticism 85 

dogmatical declarations; when an intellectual sacer- 
dotalism, as aggressive and despotic as ecclesiastical 
or political dignitaries ever were, subjects the hearts of 
the common people to the authority of the professional 
thinker and the simple faith of the untrained smolders 
low, loses confidence and initiative; and when unbelief, 
fostered by undue regard for the power of logic, becomes 
proud and boastful, then mysticism has arisen to do 
battle on behalf of the spiritual privileges of the unintel- 
ligent and untrained, with the affirmation that the heart 
hath reasons that Reason knoweth not, that the religious 
life is irreducible to the terms of mere thought, and that 
the believer is greater than the thinker. Thus it was 
with the Anabaptists of the Reformation, with the 
Quakers of the later Reformation days, with the Pietists 
of Germany, and with the revivalism of Wesley and 
Whitefield. 

The strength of mysticism lies in its originality, its 
simplicity, its power of defense, its conservation of funda- 
mental realities. Its power of resistance against oppres- 
sion is unconquerable. It protects the liberties of the 
weak. It vindicates the divinity of the human spirit and 
its supremacy over material being. 

But it has exhibited the faults that accompany such 
virtues. Strong in defense, it has not had signal success 
as a progressive Christian propaganda. Deeply rooted 
in the self-consciousness of the individual, it has not 
shown a capacity for social construction or reconstruc- 
tion. Mysticism cannot be identified with a continuous 
historical communion of faith. Its love of the unseen and 
ineffable has left little room for a bold quest of nature's 
secret by scientific methods, and it has manifested a 



86 What Is Christianity? 

constant tendency to retire from the vast arenas of life 
where men do battle with the weapons of material 
nature or struggle to build up political structures for the 
maintenance of the acquisitions of human labor in the 
past. At times tremendously brave, on the whole it is 
timid in regard to public issues and is prone to leave 
these to the care of the " worldling." Finally, unable 
after all to subsist long on pure contemplation, or, with 
aristocratic spirit, despairing of the spirituality of the 
masses, it resorts too frequently to those very externals 
in worship that it has sought to discard. Mysticism is 
not Christianity, but only a factor in the making of it. 



CHAPTER IV 
PROTESTANTISM 

In the year of grace 1529, at a meeting of the motley 
and cumbersome collection of secular and ecclesiastical 
potentates that constituted the Diet of the mediaeval 
German Empire, a minority of these rulers offered a 
joint protest to the emperor and the majority against 
a contemplated attack upon their rights. So far as con- 
cerned the deepest interests of men in general, the occa- 
sion was comparatively trivial, for it mattered little to 
the world then, as it does now, if some ecclesiast or prince- 
ling were to lose his special privileges. The mightiest 
influences in human affairs derive but little of their power 
from the will of officials or hereditary rulers. Notwith- 
standing, the occurrence was very significant inasmuch 
as the empire enjoyed a great traditional prestige even 
in those later days of its decadent power, and because 
this protest announced to all the peoples within the 
empire, and to all the other European nations that still 
professed a nominal connection with it, that a new 
political combination had arisen in support of a religious 
principle or profession. It was a sign of the times. 

It may be that few of these men were deeply or intel- 
ligently in sympathy with religion for its own sake or 
cared very much for the liberties of the multitudes whose 
destinies were to be affected by their act. It may be that 
their act was prompted by selfish political considerations, 
but their protest was in support of a religious faith, and 

87 



88 What Is Christianity ? 

it helped to force upon the attention of Europe the sig- 
nificance of the challenge which the brave monk, Martin 
Luther, had hurled into the face of the Roman papacy 
a few years before. It was the act of these protesters 
that gave to all who associated themselves thereafter 
with the opposition to Roman Catholicism the name they 
were to bear for all time to come — Protestants. As time 
passed, great companies of men rose up in many lands 
to join in further protests — no longer mainly against the 
claims of the heads of a great political system with its 
heritage of authority based upon its doings in the past, 
but against a greater and more dreaded system with its 
claims to a higher authority — the Roman Catholic 
church. The whole revolutionary movement that swept 
so swiftly over a large portion of Europe may be properly 
denoted by the term Protestantism. Our attention will 
be mostly confined to the religious side of it. 

At the outset of this study it is to be granted that 
Protestantism cannot be understood apart from its 
relation to the Catholicism against which it projected 
itself. The name is not on that account, however, sig- 
nificant of a merely negative attitude. Catholic con- 
troversialists have continued to this day to reiterate this 
old charge against it. In those early days of Protestant 
history, when the bitter struggles in defense of the new 
profession naturally called forth a determined polemic 
against Catholicism, there was some plausibility in the 
accusation; but when the story of the rise and progress 
of Protestantism is told, when its powerful creations in 
many spheres of life are exhibited to the student, the 
absurdity of the view that Protestantism is simply a 
negation of Catholicism becomes evident. It is one of 



Protestantism 89 

the greatest positive constructive forces that have 
appeared in human life. 

It is true that the outburst of this new power brought 
about for a time a degree of turmoil and confusion that 
was fairly appalling to lovers of peace and quiet. To 
such people it must have seemed at times that Protes- 
tantism was just destruction let loose. For accepted 
maxims of life were contradicted, society in many places 
was disintegrated, economic conditions were turned up- 
side down, revolutions were started, wars broke out in 
many lands, blood was shed like water, thrones toppled, 
and the great church was rent in pieces. " Prophets" 
at times went hither and thither proclaiming that the 
end of the world was at hand, and attempts were actually 
made to set up a visible kingdom of Christ on the earth. 
The storm began to calm down after a while. From the 
time that Calvin's theocracy was firmly established at 
Geneva till the Westminster Confession of Faith and the 
treaty of Westphalia were signed Protestantism was 
progressively organizing itself in stable forms of political 
and ecclesiastical government in close affiliation with 
each other, and the Protestant nations displayed a solid- 
ity and vigor that gave them promise of the domination 
of the world. Their grip has slackened at times, but has 
never been let go. Protestantism has become an abiding 
force in the life of men. 

It is not strange that the men who became leaders 
and spokesmen of the Reformation only half understood 
the real character of the powerful undercurrent of spirit- 
ual life that brought them to the surface. It was natural 
that the inner conservatism of many of these reasserted 
tself powerfully against the views of radicals. It was 



90 What Is Christianity? 

natural that they should seek to keep the new spirit under 
restraint by bringing it under the authority of existing 
conditions, partly remodeled, and by binding it to the 
terms of doctrine established by law. Looking back 
from the distance of the present, we can recognize the 
influence of several conservative interests upon the new 
movement. First of all, there was the Catholic church 
itself with its succession of priests, its sacraments, its 
methods of government, and its insistence on unity. 
Secondly, there were the political states which had arisen 
in Europe as feudalism began to fail. These strong 
governments attracted to them the firm allegiance of 
their subjects, so much so that even the church had to 
take the second place in the affections of many. Thirdly, 
there was the reverence for the past and the hesitation 
to part with its treasures of custom and tradition. 
Fourthly, there was the instinct for order with which 
every new movement must reckon. The Protestant 
leaders found it practically necessary to adjust them- 
selves to these conditions. The general outcome was a 
partial compromise. There was a checking of the reli- 
gious insurrection on the one hand and an alteration of 
the terms and forms of the old faith in a modern direc- 
tion on the other hand. Protestantism was not alto- 
gether a revolution. In the life of Christendom it was 
truly a reformation rather than a revolution. 

But was the Protestantism that came to expression 
in the institutions that bear its name in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries truly and fundamentally religious ? 
Was it not rather a watering down of religion, a pruning 
of the true Christianity in order to adjust it to the 
demands of the rational intelligence and of the secular 



Protestantism 91 

life and its institutions ? I am firmly convinced that it 
was the former. The very fact that the men who have 
been designated by the popular mind as its greatest 
representatives were the religious teachers and reformers 
and the fact that the Protestant states that arose invari- 
ably issued a confession of faith uphold this view. The 
history of the creation of Protestantism and of the devel- 
opment of its life proves it. Protestantism is a type of 
religious faith. It was really in its beginnings a religious 
revival. That the religious leaders should be the men to 
speak the word that released upon the world the forces 
that had been held in leash by the Catholic church for a 
long time was natural, for it was through the awakened 
religious consciousness of the age that men became aware 
of the depth of the changes that had been working out 
in other spheres of life. It was the Christian messages 
of the leaders that made the retention of so many of the 
traditional beliefs and practices impossible. It was the 
Christian verities that men felt called upon to vindicate 
when they strove for the larger liberty that was coming 
to them. The Protestants believed themselves to be, 
in contrast with Catholics, the true Christians. Prot- 
estantism is a specific interpretation of Christianity. 

I. HISTORICAL SOURCES OF PROTESTANTISM 

Protestantism was fed by far-off fountains that sprang 
up in those mountain recesses of human life where lowly 
people, mostly unobserved by statesmen or high ecclesi- 
astics, cultivated a simpler and purer faith than that 
which held the high places of the earth. It is now pretty 
certain that a non-churchly and non-sacramental type 
of Christian faith lived on through the Dark Ages before 



92 What Is Christianity? 

mediaeval Europe was born. Albert H. Newman says: 
"That there were hosts of true believers during the 
darkest ages of Christian history can by no means be 
doubted." 1 When the Clugniac revival of religion in the 
Catholic church produced a purification and great exten- 
sion of monastic orders until the monastic ideal of life 
was accepted as the Catholic Christian ideal, this lay- 
man's faith also grew and flourished. The story of Peter 
de Bruys, Henry of Lausanne, and Arnold of Brescia 
proves that they who maintained this other type of faith 
were by no means ignorant people. Their success in 
France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy created 
alarm in the ranks of the orthodox. For they under- 
mined the very foundations of the Catholic system. 
Infant baptism, intercessions for the dead, sacrifices, 
prayers to saints, consecration of holy days and places, 
veneration of relics, and similar practices were power- 
fully attacked, and that not merely on rational grounds, 
but on the ground that these things violate the spiritual- 
ity and moral purity of the Christian faith. Their ideal 
was likeness to Jesus in the common relations of life. 

The great work of the Waldenses in translating the 
Scriptures into the vernacular and circulating them far 
and wide drew upon these devoted people the persecuting 
zeal of the monks. The deadly inquisition for heresy 
was set to work. The story of its horrors cannot be told 
here, nor the story of the splendid resistance of these 
evangelicals. Suffice it to say that, while these people 
were forced to do most of their work in secret, the faith 
they held could not be extirpated. When the church 
became more and more entangled in politics and forgot 

1 History of Antipaedobaptism, p. 28. 



Protestantism 93 

the needs of the masses, increasing multitudes got more 
and more out of hand and followed their own inclination. 
The result was the appearance of two popular types of re- 
ligion side by side. The one was the priestly, sacramental 
religion that multiplied its rites and its intercessors, that 
went on great pilgrimages to holy shrines, that prayed to 
Mary and a host of departed "saints," that paid for 
prayers and masses, that frequented the confessional, 
that purchased indulgences, that trembled at the pros- 
pect of the Judgment Day and hell, and shrank in terror 
from Christ, the awful Judge. The other was a religion 
that revered the words of Jesus, that tried to follow his 
steps, that nurtured love and a tender conscience, whose 
priests were the whole communion of believers, whose 
invisible altars were on the common highways of life — a 
religion that sought the favor neither of princes nor of 
ecclesiastics, and that appeared at its best in the family 
circle and not in the monastery or the nunnery. It was 
intelligent because it was particularly a Bible-reading 
religion. 

This was the main religious source of Protestantism. 
But for its antecedent operations throughout Europe, 
Luther would probably never have been heard from or 
would have spoken to deaf ears. If Protestantism was 
characterized by its emphasis on the authority of the 
Bible, the explanation lies here. It was not simply 
because of the exigencies of controversy. It was not 
simply because it was found that the weapon which the 
Catholic church had forged for its own defense when it 
made a canon of sacred Scripture could be used to smite 
its maker to the ground. But it was mainly because 
the spirit that inspired Protestant religion and enabled it 



94 What Is Christianity? 

to endure the storms of the times had been, and con- 
tinued to be, nourished on the Bible. 

Tributary to this powerful current was the growing 
demand for a morality that would be personal and pure. 
If it is true that the penitential system of the church 
grew out of the effort to train the rude masses in a knowl- 
edge of the obligations of the Christian life, it is also true 
that the necessity of securing large funds for its pur- 
poses led the church to turn its penitential system into 
a method of evading direct responsibility and of bargain- 
ing for absolution from guilt. The moral reforms which 
the monks sought tended to arouse sluggish consciences 
for a time, but the monastic institutions tended in a 
double way to aggravate the evils of the times. For 
the ascetic ideal tends to the disparagement of the com- 
mon things of life and, consequently, to the minimizing 
of moral failure in common things. Also, the very suc- 
cess of monasticism and its admission to a high place in 
the church's system led to a corruption of monastic 
morals to such an extent that the common people in 
many places looked upon the cassock of the priest and 
the begging-bowl of the friar with unconcealed scorn. 
Neither of them could be trusted at large. Lay morality 
was higher than the morality of the priest and the monk. 

Another tributary influence sprang from the growing 
sense of personal worth. The gradual breakdown of the 
older feudalism and the reduction of the serf or villein 
who was bound to the soil to the level of the chattels of 
a distant master were matched by the development of 
commerce in connection with the crusades, the growth 
of large cities, the increasing demands for artisans in 
these cities ; the substitution of the money-wage for pay- 



Protestantism 95 

ment in kind, the organization of workingmen's guilds 
for mutual advantage and the higher exaltation of the 
individual. The new industrial and social conditions 
in the cities aroused new hopes in the minds of the coun- 
try peasantry. Organizations of the peasantry became 
numerous and powerful. They began to insist on the 
recognition of rights hitherto denied them. The rising 
wave of peasant feeling was deeply imbued with the 
spirit of religion. Intrepid leaders appeared. The 
Lollards in England, the Hussites in Bohemia, the leagues 
of the Bundschuh in Germany, were all inspired with a 
similar spirit. The attempt of the Empire, on the one 
hand, and of the Church, on the other hand, to impose 
upon the people an imperial system that would reduce 
them all to virtual serfdom only stimulated the risings 
the more. The Swiss peasants won a great victory and 
their independence from their imperial masters. The 
hope of like conquests spread like wildfire throughout 
Central Europe. Democracy raised its head. The 
man, kept down by ages of ignorance and oppression, 
was coming to himself. 

There was also the influence of the growing national- 
ism of Europe. The national spirit was abroad. It 
supervened upon feudalism. Both emperors and popes 
feared it, for it contested their claims, and ultimately 
thwarted the ambitions of both. The affirmation of 
national rights became a rallying-cry for those who pro- 
tested against the pecuniary exactions of the papacy 
and the draining away of the country's revenues to fill 
the coffers of a foreign prelate. The English, the Scotch, 
the French, and the Spaniards were rapidly realizing 
their national ambitions. The Wycliffian Reformation 



g6 What Is Christianity? 

in England and the Hussite Reformation in Bohemia 
owed their success in no small degree to their intimate 
connection with the national aspirations in both coun- 
tries. National aspirations were rising among the Ger- 
mans, the Dutch, the Italians, and elsewhere. The 
papacy first and the Empire next were the chief outer 
obstacles to the realization of these hopes. Religion 
took on a national character. The aim of bringing the 
church in each country under the control of the govern- 
ment of the country gained backing steadily. Protes- 
tantism gave the signal to make the religion of the land 
a function of the state. The state was no longer to be 
viewed as merely secular, no longer of merely earthly 
origin. It was founded by heaven and its rights were 
divine. The natural had become the holy. 

A single word only need be said about the Renais- 
sance. The revival of learning affected directly at first 
only the intellectuals, but its influence was bound to 
permeate whole communities in course of time. It 
liberated the mind from bondage to authority in the 
realm of knowledge and thereby gave support to the 
growing religious freedom. It revived the interest in 
the distant past and stimulated a search for the true 
Christian beginnings. It opened the way to new inter- 
pretations of the Christian Scriptures. It reaffirmed 
the competency of the human reason to discover truth 
in any realm. It brought the pretensions of many of the 
accredited church leaders into contempt by exposing 
their ignorance. It strengthened confidence in the 
worth of the natural as against a narrow supranatural- 
ism. It gave new strength to the scientific impulse and 
the desire for discovery and invention in all realms of 



Protestantism 97 

knowledge. It threw broadcast the invitation to come 
to nature and learn her secret from herself. 

Protestantism was an outcome of the union of these 
forces and the penetration of them all by the spirit of 
religious revival. The manner in which they were com- 
bined varied greatly in different countries and in different 
groups in the same countries, but it is not difficult to 
discover one prevailing trend amid their differences. 
This, I trust, will become manifest by an analysis of 
Protestantism from various points of view. 

2. THE PROTESTANT RELIGIOUS SPIRIT 

A classic expression of the inner religious life of Prot- 
estantism is found in the answer to the first question in 
the Heidelberg Catechism: "What is thy only comfort 
in life and in death ?" Answer : 

That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, am not 
my own, but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who with 
his precious blood has fully satisfied for all my sins, and redeemed 
me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that with- 
out the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my 
head; yea, all things must work together for my salvation. Where- 
fore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and 
makes me heartily willing and ready henceforth to live unto him. 

In this popular statement the three great mountain 
peaks of the Protestant religious consciousness stand out 
clearly : loyalty to a personal God, confidence in the orderly 
course of the universe, the sense of inner worth. The dif- 
ferent Protestant communions vary in the intelligence 
and firmness with which they hold to these fundamentals 
and in the emphasis they place upon them, respectively, 
but these convictions are characteristic of them all. 



98 What Is Christianity ? 

First: The religion of the Protestant consists primarily 
in the consciousness of the immediate personal relation with 
God. In the answer to the first question of the West- 
minster Shorter Catechism it is stated theologically: 
"What is the chief end of man?" Answer: "Man's 
chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." 
Here there is no blind or confused groping after an 
unknowable essence of deity or divinity, no vague sur- 
mise of the presence of an ineffable Somewhat, of a 
Silence or Abyss beyond all the range of human intel- 
ligence, but the affirmation of a direct contact with a 
personality as real and as definite in his existence as we 
are. Protestant theology may not have lived up to this 
standard always, but this is the Protestant faith. There 
can be no toleration of an effort to interpose anything 
between God and the soul, for this would be an insult 
to the divine prerogative and an injury to the human 
spirit. God reveals himself to man and confers good 
gifts upon him according to his own will. Man prays 
to God directly and obeys or disobeys on his own behalf. 
Hence the Protestant love for simplicity in worship. 
Hence the sternness with which the Protestants repudi- 
ated the mediatorial system of the Catholic church — 
its spurious sacraments, its prescribed devotions, its 
priestly intercessions and absolutions, its saints, its 
holy seasons of fasts and feasts, and its legalistic regula- 
tions — not merely because they were absurd and vain, 
but because they were profane and wicked, a violation 
of the rights of man and a usurpation of the authority 
of God. Hence the determination of Protestants to 
reduce the tangled mass of teachings and usages that 
had held the multitudes so long in spiritual bondage, to 



Protestantism 99 

the simplicity that they believed to have existed in the 
original faith of Christians. Hence also their repudia- 
tion of ecclesiastical authority in favor of the real author- 
ity of those Scriptures that came directly from God. 

The religious view of God carried with it a religious 
view of the Bible. The demand for certainty in our 
relations with God implied a need for a pure expression 
of his will. This the Protestants found in the Christian 
(and Jewish) Scriptures. Whatever we may now say 
as to the value of the presuppositions with which they 
approached the study of the Bible or as to the value of 
their methods of interpretation, there can be no doubt 
that they made an honest attempt to understand its 
true and original meaning, and that, not in the interest 
of historical or literary knowledge, but in the interest 
of their religious faith. They revered it as the "pure 
word of God" and sought to obey its instructions as the 
commands of God. The Catholic church had utilized 
the Bible in the interest of a system, but the Protestants 
sought to find in it the disclosure of the mutual approach 
of God and man, and to them largely we owe the exalta- 
tion of its religious value, even if, as we must confess, 
they often subordinated it to a system of doctrines partly 
derived from another source. 

The Protestant religious spirit moved between a 
negative and a positive pole. The negative pole was a 
sense of ill-desert. The catechumen who studied the 
Heidelberg Confession learned to speak of "my sins" 
in the very first sentence he uttered. The sense of sin 
lay heavily on the conscience of those believers. The 
language of the Fifty-first Psalm was spontaneous to 
them and it was often on their lips. They accepted from 



ioo What Is Christianity? 

Catholicism and Augustine the doctrine of original sin 
because it seemed to utter the truth of their experience, 
and they intensified its meaning and tried to take it in 
its most fearful sense. When they spoke of sin it was 
not a metaphysical defect or want of true knowledge 
they had particularly in mind, but the contrast of the 
human character when they contemplated the holiness 
of God. Sin was moral, it was rebellion, it was spiritual 
turpitude, it was ill-desert; and they could find no better 
expression of its unworthiness than the Catholic doctrine 
of an endless hell of torment. Nevertheless, when they 
thought of God, the principal emphasis was not upon sin. 
The positive pole of the Protestant religious spirit 
was a consciousness of being the recipient of grace. Here 
these believers followed Augustine and, like him, they 
emphasized the greatness of their sin all the more because 
they believed that thereby they exalted the divine grace. 
The sense of sin was only the dark background of the 
picture of their inner life. Their spirit was not gloomy 
in the end, but it was filled with a joyful confidence. 
This is what made their tremendous achievements pos- 
sible. They were filled with the feeling of dependence 
on God, but it was not the dependence of the mere sup- 
pliant or beggar, or of the hopeless criminal on his way 
to the gallows. It was the dependence of one who was 
aware that the divine love had flowed out upon him and 
made him a being of the higher order. It was the 
dependence of the loved one upon the lover, such a 
dependence as finds its best expression in a loyal and 
hearty self -surrender. "I, with body and soul, both in life 
and in death, am not my own, but belong to my faithful 
Saviour Jesus Christ." This is one of the things that 



Protestantism 101 

made the doctrine of election and predestination so 
dear to them; it confirmed the assurance of the divine 
favor. 

This union of the sense of sin and the assurance of 
grace rested on a vision of the cross of Christ. It was 
not that they contemplated the picture of his suffering 
as valuable for its own sake. It was not that they were 
trying, after the Catholic fashion, to repeat in their own 
souls the agonies of Jesus on the cross as the perfection 
of asceticism, but it was because they believed that 
"where sin abounded grace did abound the more exceed- 
ingly," and in the suffering of Christ they saw this prin- 
ciple in operation as an act of- God himself. It was not 
the suffering of the cross so much as its moral signifi- 
cance that made it the center of their faith. They could 
live henceforth confidently and trustfully because this 
supreme gift assured all other good. 

Secondly: The faith of Protestantism appears in its 
attitude of assured confidence rather than trembling anxiety 
toward the course of the world. While mysticism sought 
to scorn the world, while Catholicism viewed it mostly 
with mingled fear and contempt, Protestantism takes 
a positive religious interest in it. Notwithstanding the 
occasional lapses of Calvinists, and notwithstanding the 
perpetuation of their Catholic inheritance of the view 
that nature had been corrupted and that the ills of this 
life are made great in order that our hearts might be 
weaned from it and prepared for the world to come, the 
Protestants drew great spiritual comfort and inspiration 
from the contemplation of the world of nature and of 
man. Lacking the modern scientific view of the con- 
stancy of nature, they enjoyed a religious anticipation 



102 What Is Christianity? 

of it in the conviction that events in the material 
world — from the movements of a planet to the stirrings 
of a blade of grass — and events of human history, even 
of the most trifling and seemingly fortuitous kind — from 
the bad deeds of wicked men to the sublimest sacrifices 
of good men — came under the direct control of an unerr- 
ing and kind Providence. It was in no spirit of cold 
speculation or fatalism that the Westminster Con- 
fession asserted that "God from all eternity did, by the 
most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and 
unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass," but 
because it was, as Calvin held, the essential postulate 
of "the inestimable felicity of a pious mind." It was 
not that these people had consciously worked out a spec- 
ulative view of the universe or fancied that they could 
demonstrate the truth of such a hypothesis, but because 
they had a consciousness of the indispensability of the 
divine presence at all times. They must see God every- 
where in order to be at peace in the midst of the turmoils 
of their time. What seemed inexplicable in a world 
that he made they felt must be governed "by the secret 
counsel of God." Everything in the world had a reli- 
gious significance to them. Even inanimate objects 
"exert their force only in so far as directed by the imme- 
diate hand of God." They were not unaware of the 
danger to faith and to morality in such a view, but they 
were willing to endure those risks for the sake of the 
assurance it gave that "all things must work together 
for my salvation." This abiding sense of subjection, 
with all things, to God's will was quite in keeping with 
the Protestant conviction that there was free access to 
him in every place and all the world was a sanctuary. 



Protestantism 103 

Thirdly: Protestant religious faith embraced a con- 
sciousness of holy inspiration, purification of heart, and 
strength of will. The Protestants felt themselves superior 
to Catholics because the latter fell back on a belief in the 
mysterious gifts supposedly communicated in symbols, 
and lacked that " secret testimony of the Spirit" that 
gave the light of noonday to the human soul. It is true 
that utterances of Protestant piety abound in confessions 
of utter unworthiness and even worthlessness, but that 
was meant to refer to men apart from the grace of God — 
which was not their true self. It was this that enabled 
the Protestants to dispense with the absolutions of 
priests, the mediation of saints, and the voice of the 
church to certify the truth to them, because they had 
the truth within them, because they felt that a pure 
heart could never receive punishment from God, and 
because he who receives the divine assurance of blessed- 
ness in his soul can accept no other. Hence it was that 
they so often — extravagantly, it seems to us — regarded 
those who opposed their convictions as ipso facto enemies 
of God. Their doctrine of the Scriptures became a pro- 
tection to them against the dangers of fanaticism to 
which such a faith made them subject. Indeed, it must 
be pointed out that they went so far as to persecute with 
extreme severity those who carried this sense of the 
indwelling of the divine Spirit to the whole length, and it 
sometimes became a very weak factor in Protestant life. 

3. THE PROTESTANT ESTIMATE OF HUMAN LIFE — ITS 
MORAL OUTLOOK 

It will hardly be contended that people who were 
ready to put men into prisons or send them to death 
because of a refusal to accept their beliefs on the highest 



104 What Is Christianity? 

and most difficult of all questions, or who regarded a 
large portion of the human race as heirs of the misdeeds 
of another and the inevitable consequences of those 
misdeeds by eternal divine decree and without their con- 
sent in advance, or who sentenced men to everlasting 
suffering for the glory of God, could have possessed the 
most exalted conception of the worth and sacredness 
of human life. Yet it is true that Protestantism 
maintained a high estimate of the human personality 
notwithstanding these shocking facts. Indeed, one 
might almost say that these very defects bear par- 
tial testimony to the dignity of the Protestant view 
of man. 

In the bloody persecution of Catholics and other 
" heretics" the Protestants proved that they had learned 
only too well the lesson that Catholicism had taught 
them. Human life appears of comparatively small 
account when it may be destroyed for a difference of 
opinion. On the continent of Europe in those days men 
generally felt small compunction on account of killing 
men for these differences. In England it was otherwise. 
Queen Mary was nicknamed "the Bloody," though she 
had executed for their faith only two hundred and odd 
people. On the Continent she would have been regarded 
as rather merciful. The Protestant statesmen of Eliza- 
beth's reign declared that they had put none to death 
for their religious beliefs. But this was exceptional 
among Protestants. How it harmonized with the Prot- 
estant contention for the right of individual interpre- 
tation of Scripture cannot be shown. At the same time 
it does bear testimony to their view that men can be held 
responsible for their opinions. 



Protestantism 105 

It is somewhat the same with the Protestant view of 
an endless hell. That Christian men should be able to 
face with comparative complacency the prospect of such 
a fate awaiting the majority of mankind seems now 
incredible, or at least inexplicable. How can it be said 
that the human personality is sacred if it be true that 
"by the decree of God, for the manifestation of his glory, 
some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting 
life, and others foreordained to everlasting death" that 
"their number is so certain and definite that it cannot 
be either increased or diminished," and that the second 
class "shall be cast into eternal torments"? And yet 
it must be said that this terrible doctrine can be taken, 
not so much as an essential view of Protestantism, but 
rather as a perversion of the profound conviction that 
the moral issues of a human life are so solemn that by 
nothing short of their eternal outcome can we estimate 
their meaning. 

Taking such statements, then, not as adequate or 
correct expressions of the fundamental Protestant esti- 
mate of the worth of human life, we may see in them a 
clue to the Protestant conviction in this regard. That 
is to say, the value of the human personality is based 
not so much upon its aesthetic or its intellectual powers 
as upon its ethical quality and its moral possibilities. 
Human destiny is twofold because there are just two 
alternatives before men, and these are morally deter- 
mined. 

First: Human conduct must always be interpreted in 
its relation to a holy, commanding will. This will has been 
revealed to men in an inviolable law — the everlasting 
"thou shalt" and its answer, "I ought." This law, 



106 What Is Christianity? 

though manifold in its injunctions, is one in principle. 
A transgression of it in any one particular is a violation 
of the whole. It covers every relation in life and there- 
fore it can be satisfied with nothing short of absolute 
holiness, unexceptional obedience. Its majesty is inef- 
fable, its validity eternal! 

There can be no compromise with its demands. There 
can be no neutrality toward it, there can be no division 
of loyalty to it. There can be no middle ground between 
obedience and disobedience. Therefore there can be no 
trifling with it, no exceptions to the moral imperative, 
no slackening of its claims, no compounding of felonies. 
As every crime is a sin and every sin a crime, punishment 
must be without compunction or reserve. The sanctions 
of the law are inevitable. The dual destiny is essential 
to its authority. This it was, more than anything else, 
that led to the severity with which the demoralizing 
practices of the Catholic church were repressed in Prot- 
estant countries. The sale of indulgences and other 
modes of bargaining with the moral law were not simply 
foolish and vain in the eyes of the Reformers, but they 
were wicked and deserving of punishment. Unfortu- 
nately, we must add, this same sternness of moral judg- 
ment had something to do with the extravagant penalties 
that were visited by the courts on delinquents in Protes- 
tant countries. The grandeur of the Protestant con- 
science was sometimes turned into a spectacle of horror. 

Secondly: While Catholicism accentuated the negative 
side of morality, Protestantism laid its emphasis on the 
positive side. It was not the qualities of renunciation, 
resignation, or self-obliteration that charmed the Prot- 
estant soul, but the exercise of the positive qualities of 



Protestantism 107 

industry, courage, and determination. The Kingdom of 
God was to be won, not by retirement from the tasks 
of common life, but in the vigorous prosecution of them. 
Among the saints of Protestantism were the men of 
affairs. So insistent were the Reformers on the highest 
standards for all that they repudiated the idea of a grada- 
tion among Christians according to the degree to which 
they severally conformed to an ideal. The demands of 
the standard of life were absolute. 

In this way the new form of Christian faith inculcated 
in its adherents a deep self-respect, a self-affirmation that 
threatened at times to degenerate into self-assertion. 
The man was elevated consciously above the organiza- 
tions or the society in which he found himself. Against 
the very institutions that had nurtured him he rose up 
in protest because of their defects. He judged and 
denounced the society that had conserved the very moral 
interests that he held dear, because it fell short of its own 
ideals. He went even farther. He challenged the very 
ideals to which he had been bred and called men to the 
higher. The Protestant was essentially a moral pro- 
gressive, a reformer. He found no resting-place for his 
feet; he must ever go forward. Pure conservatism was 
stagnation and stagnation was death, the very negation 
of the moral. It was natural, then, that division should 
occur in the Protestant ranks as they sought the higher 
ideals. It was healthful, too. For it was not conform- 
ity to type — much as some Protestants sought it — that 
gave Protestantism its solidity, but in the inner impera- 
tive to transcend all types it found its firmness and 
stability. For the soul of Protestantism was in the 
man and not in the system. "Here I stand, I can no 



108 What Is Christianity ? 

otherwise/' said Luther before the Diet of Worms — 
the man confronting the system and in those very words 
placing beneath the system a bomb that blew it into 
fragments ! 

Protestant morality is constructive. It builds from 
within rather than from without. It has more con- 
fidence in the power of personal initiative to work the 
good of humanity than in external restraint or constraint. 
It seeks unity, but the unity that dreads uniformity; 
a unity into which men grow and not a union that forbids 
growth. Thus, notwithstanding its oft-repeated theo- 
logical dogma of human depravity, its confidence reposed 
in that very human nature which Catholicism had taught 
its leaders to describe as fallen and destitute of good. 
Hence the Protestant churches, while insisting that good 
works — such "good works" as the Catholic church 
required as the condition of salvation — were in no sense 
saving, demanded, nevertheless, that the fruits of sal- 
vation should be manifested by everyone in good works. 
The Calvinistic churches, in particular, exercised a severe 
discipline over their members and even found in good 
works the assurance of their divine election. 

Thirdly: The ethics of Protestantism stands for the 
wholesomeness and sanctity of the natural. Catholicism 
has put the stigma of uncleanness upon the natural. 
Natural modes of life and natural institutions were 
unholy until they had been brought under the cleansing 
power of the church's sacraments. Even the wedded 
life and the propagation of the race are traced to evil, 
that is, fleshly concupiscence, until by subjection to the 
sacrament of marriage the evil character of it is purged. 
But notwithstanding the use of the sacrament of mar- 



Protestantism 109 

riage, the highest life, true Christian perfection, is found 
in celibacy. The wedded life, parenthood, are placed 
on a lower grade. The orthodox Catholic view of the 
natural institution of marriage seemed to the Protes- 
tants to carry with it a derogatory view of many other 
natural modes of life and the forms of their develop- 
ment, such as industry, trades, commerce, and the duties 
of civil and political life in general. 

From the first stages of its progress Protestantism 
consciously joined issue with Catholicism at this point. 
The Augsburg Confession argues: 

The commandments of God and the true worship of God are 
obscured when men hear that monks alone are in that state of 
perfection; because that Christian perfection is this, to fear God 
sincerely, and, again, to conceive great faith and to trust as- 
suredly that God is pacified toward us for Christ's sake: to ask, 
and certainly to look for, help from God in all our affairs, accord- 
ing to our calling; and outwardly to do good works diligently and 
to attend to our vocation. In these things doth true perfection 
and the true worship of God consist: it doth not consist in single- 
ness of life, in beggary, or in vile apparel. [All italics are mine.l 

The Protestants held that in the purity of the natural 
family relation the basis was laid for the purity of all 
those forms of industry and civil life which guard the 
family interest and supply the family's needs. Here 
was the foundation of the view that the whole of human- 
ity may be regarded as one great family founded in 
nature and therefore divine. 

The Protestant sees the ideal of womanhood, not in 
the pale face and upturned eyes of her that wears the 
garb of the nun, but rather in the mother heart and busy 
life of her who stands with uprolled sleeves before the 
washtub or rocks her baby to sleep in her arms or cares 



no What Is Christianity? 

for the food and clothing of the inmates of the home. 
He sees the ideal of manhood, not in him of the shaven 
head or priestly gown who has scorned the love of the 
sexes, the affections and the trials of the home, the bar- 
gaining at the market-place, the administration of a city, 
or the execution of law and justice in the state; but 
he sees the truly Christian man in him of the brawny 
arm and busy brain who plunges into the common things 
of life as his Father's business and finds the fulfilment 
of his heart's ambitions in the secular task of every day. 
When one finds that it is the Protestant peoples who are 
progressive in morals, in knowledge, in industry, and in 
politics, it is only what one should expect. 

4. PROTESTANTISM AS A THEORY OF TRUTH — ITS 
DOCTRINAL STANDARDS 

On this involved and weighty subject it is not pos- 
sible to say more than a few words in the present con- 
nection. 

It is to be remembered from the outset that while 
Catholicism is fundamentally institutional, Protestant- 
ism is fundamentally personal. Catholicism has its 
sacraments; Protestantism has its truth. Catholicism 
insists on assent; Protestantism on faith. Catholicism 
inculcates submission; Protestantism inculcates knowl- 
edge. Catholicism, accordingly, regards its doctrines 
as legal requirements, as preconditions of receiving the 
church's benefits; Protestantism regards its doctrines 
as the very life of the soul, as the knowledge of the way 
of God to the heart of the man and the way of the man to 
the heart of God. Protestantism, therefore, takes its 
doctrines more seriously than Catholicism and takes 



Protestantism in 

special pains to inculcate them. Thus, while the ritual 
is central to Catholic worship, the preaching or instruc- 
tion is central to Protestant worship. The priest 
gives place to the teacher and the sacraments to the 
doctrine. 

The doctrines which Protestantism inherited from 
the Catholic church take on new vigor. For example, 
the Protestant orthodox creeds accept, and renew 
allegiance to, the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the 
two natures of Christ. With the Catholic church these 
had become mysteries to be received without insight 
into their worth and they had lost their original meaning 
for the masses (and probably for the priests), having a 
sort of legal value only. The Protestant theologians 
renewed the vigor of these beliefs by impressing on the 
minds of men the need of a mediatorial sufferer to bear 
the guilt of sinful men, the actual enjoyment of the favor 
of God, and the certainty of an inner conscious renewal 
and fellowship with God in the Spirit. The old doctrines 
lived again, though in a very different sense from that 
which they had in the earlier times. The doctrine of 
the Trinity and the doctrine of the God-man expressed 
the Protestant experience. There was a reconstruction, 
but from a different point of view. 

If the heart of ancient Catholic piety lay in the long- 
ing for infinitude and immortality, the longing of the 
Protestant heart was for righteousness, the deliverance 
from guilt, and the peace and power of mind which right- 
eousness produces. The redemption which Protestant- 
ism sought was not escape from materiality and death, 
but escape from condemnation. Its great doctrines be- 
gin really with its conception of justification. That is, 



ii2 What Is Christianity? 

God was first of all the Lord and Judge of mankind. 
The solemn scene of the court room is the best symbol 
of his relations with us. The redemption of the sinner 
takes the form of a process at law. It can occur only- 
through the satisfaction of offended justice, and this can 
be only on condition of someone's bearing the penalty. 
The hopelessness of man is relieved by the appearing of 
a God-sent, divine-human sufferer who bears the eternal 
penalty and frees the sinner. The whole is an act of the 
unmerited and infinite grace of God. 

It was natural that, when assurance of this great gift 
was sought, the answer to the inquiring heart should be 
first given in the affirmation that men are justified 
through faith and not by their works. Then, when it 
became necessary to assure men that the basis of such 
an estimate of faith was safe, the answer took the form 
of a doctrine of atonement. The center of gravity was 
transferred from an inward experience to an objective, 
divinely constituted reality. But there was incomplete 
satisfaction in this view till it was determined whether 
/ and you are among those who are thus actually 
redeemed, whether there is absolute certainty of our 
redemption. The answer now takes the form of a doc- 
trine of divine election and foreordination. And thus, 
at length, at the hands of the Calvinistic theologians, 
the whole career of mankind from the eternity of the 
past to the eternity of the future was construed as the 
outworking of an absolutely irresistible and sure divine 
purpose that involves the everlasting and unchangeable 
destiny of each and all according as the inscrutable will 
of God determined from eternity. Thus Protestant 
theology became a theory of God's government of the 



Protestantism 113 

universe. The glory of God is everything and the 
desires and rights of the individual man pass out of 
sight. 

It is plain that the theoretical basis of Protestant 
doctrine was Paulinism interpreted through Augustine. 
More exactly, the Pauline experience and the Pauline 
exposition of sin and grace, narrowed to the Augustinian 
experience and theory of world-government, were treated 
as the heart of the gospel and the clue to the Scriptures. 
Everything else was brought to the test of this touch- 
stone. Reformation theology was largely in substance 
a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. The 
methods of the Protestant theologians were those of the 
Roman Catholic theologians purged of extravagances 
and ecclesiastical claims. Natural theology is accepted 
as far as it goes. It is supplemented and corrected by 
the Bible, which is the full and final revelation of God's 
plan of salvation. The teachings of the Scriptures were 
a unit. There was little attention to their historical 
setting, and more and more they tended to become a law 
for thinking as well as for life. Speculations and queries 
tending to bring theological dogmas into question were 
dismissed as impertinent and profane. 

5. PROTESTANTISM ON ITS INSTITUTIONAL SIDE 

Here Protestantism stood rather between Catholicism 
and mysticism. It had not the Catholic realistic idea 
of the church. Christianity was greater than church. 
The invisible and spiritual " church'' was greater than 
the visible and temporal church. Salvation was found 
only in the former, but was not dependent truly on the 
latter. And yet Protestantism was not clear on this 



ii4 What Is Christianity? 

point. It shrank from a full abandonment of the Catho- 
lic view of the efficacy of sacraments. 

Sometimes, especially among Calvinists, there was 
held a legalistic view of the church. The Bible was the 
lawbook prescribing its forms and its activities. Others, 
like some Anglicans and Lutherans, held to a looser 
view of the church and were more concerned to secure 
the independence of the state than the freedom of the 
church. Others, again, like the Anabaptists and the 
(later) Baptists, held firmly to the freedom of the church 
and had little to say positively of the state. On the 
whole, it is to be said that the Protestants found in their 
Christian faith a purifying and strengthening influence 
working upon the natural institutions of human life and 
raising the common to the level of the holy. Thus, 
instead of the divine origin of the ecclesiastical order, 
Protestantism tended to exalt the divine sanction of the 
civil order. In place of the divine right of popes there 
was the divine right of kings or princes or parliaments. 
Instead of the supremacy of the priest in the life of the 
household there was the supremacy of the parent. 
Protestantism, therefore, on the whole, interpreted 
Christianity not as institutional but as a supernatural 
transforming energy working through the natural insti- 
tutions of men and exalting them to be the natural 
instruments of God's grace as it works out a heavenly, 
beneficent purpose. 



CHAPTER V 
RATIONALISM 

The term " rationalism," like so many other hybrids, 
is commonly used by controversialists in a somewhat 
derogatory sense. No such implication is intended in 
the present discussion. To some readers, however, it 
may occasion surprise to find rationalism treated as one 
of the typical interpretations of Christianity, for people 
have been accustomed to hearing it characterized as a foe 
to Christianity and, indeed, to all religion. For they will 
say, perhaps, "Does it not seek to discredit the authority 
of the Bible ? Does it not repudiate the essential Chris- 
tian doctrines ? Does it not deny the need or the reality 
of any revelation whatsoever? Does it not, in fact, 
ignore the supernatural altogether ?" 

That there have been forms of rationalism that, to 
the minds of their advocates, were synonymous with 
religious unbelief is not to be disputed. There have 
been not a few thinkers who, in the name of what they 
call reason, have undertaken to show the absurdity of 
religious hopes and beliefs. Such a type of rationalism 
is pretty sure to misinterpret the religion it seeks to com- 
bat. But in history there has appeared also another 
type of rationalism that has sought to be friendly to 
religion, and particularly to Christianity, a rationalism 
that professes, not to destroy, but to fulfil faith by freeing 
it from the influence of ideas that seemed to confuse and 
corrupt it. There has been and there is a rationalism 

"5 



n6 What Is Christianity? 

that seeks to minister to faith by insisting that the 
utterances of religion shall harmonize with the canons 
of thought. 

It is not easy to define rationalism. It lacks the 
concreteness of Catholicism and Protestantism. We 
cannot point to any institution or mode of religious life 
that professes to embody it. It lacks the distinctness of 
mysticism, for it does not seek retirement from the 
world, but professes an intimate relation to everything 
we do or say. Moreover, all men claim to be rational, 
though, according to Carlyle, there are comparatively 
few who can make good the claim! To be rational is 
to be possessed of reason, that is, the power of orderly, 
consistent thinking. But in addition to the power of 
thought there are other functions of nature or forms of 
experience, such as feeling and volition, which seem 
very different and almost, if not quite, independent of 
thought. Unthinking emotions seem to spring up from 
some unfathomed depth of our nature and to carry us 
on by the force of their impulse to unthought-of and 
unintended results. Many people seem to be governed 
by unreflecting feeling. Others, again, lack both thought 
and feeling, it would seem. For by the mere force and 
doggedness of will they do things which set both human 
feelings and human thinking at naught. A rationalist 
in general is one who, while recognizing a place for the 
play of feeling and of will in our nature, seeks to sub- 
ordinate both to the controlling force of thought. He 
stands for the rightful supremacy of intellect in men. 
Emotion and will are wayward and fitful in themselves 
and they may become wanton and harmful. Mere 
animalism lies in that direction. The distinctive dig- 



Rationalism 117 

nity of man consists in that intelligent discernment or 
judgment which makes him superior to all the fluctua- 
tions of feeling and volition and gives his life an order 
and steadiness like that of the ordered cosmos around 
him. Thought is legislative in relation to emotion 
and will. Man understands, man reasons, he is logical. 
That is what makes him man. A rationalist in reli- 
gion is one who stands for the absolute supremacy 
of the logical understanding in the determination of 
the true and the false in religion as in everything 
else. 

It is held, then, that a direct contradiction in any- 
thing is intolerable. The illogical is the false. Men 
cannot permanently believe anything but the truth, 
whether it be in matters of fact or of conduct or of faith. 
Science is concerned with matters of fact, ethics with 
matters of conduct, and theology with matters of faith 
or religion. The principle that determines ultimately 
what is to be held for truth is the same in all three 
realms. This means, then, that as little as, for example, 
science can endure a contradiction in fact, so also it is 
impossible to admit a contradiction between science and 
ethics or theology. Anything that would destroy the 
harmony between these is to be rejected. Nothing can 
be held to be theologically true that is scientifically 
false. A true religion is one whose doctrines are true 
and a false religion is one whose doctrines are false. 
Religion must stand the logical test. 

Now, in assigning this primacy to the logical under- 
standing we are assigning to it at the same time priority. 
It is the first in the field. Apart from it nothing what- 
ever is known. It discovers truth. All supposed truth 



n8 What Is Christianity? 

that is communicated to us through extraordinary chan- 
nels, whether it be by revelation or by mystical or sub- 
conscious processes, is to be compelled to make good its 
claim by being built upon the prior truth of the reason. 
Reason is the true organ of all knowledge in all realms. 
The true religion is, in the end, the religion of reason. 
There can be no other. If we hold that Christianity 
is the one true religion, it is because in it reason comes to 
her highest utterance or self-expression. This, it seems 
to me, is the position of a thoroughgoing " Christian 
rationalism." 

It will be admitted that religious people commonly 
shrink from applying this rigid test to their own faith, 
even if they do apply it to the faith of others. There 
seems to be something dearer to them than logic. They 
will persist in believing things which seem to others 
illogical and impossible. In fact, all the historical reli- 
gions have had traditions of occurrences that seem to 
defy the power of reason to explain or justify. They 
have been characterized by explosions of emotion or 
daring acts of will that offend the sober sense of conven- 
tional humanity and boldly challenge reason to do its 
worst — and apparently with success. A stalemate often 
arises. Reason, it seems, cannot abandon its prerogative, 
and religion will not. One shrinks from disorder. The 
other shrinks from the commonplace, the conventional, 
the uninspiring. It is no uncommon thing to find men 
even of great intellectual power and willing to accord 
to reason a directive relation to external things at the 
same time scorning its claims to dictate the terms of 
religious belief. The great Tertullian, with all his con- 
fidence that the soul was naturally Christian, neverthe- 



Rationalism 119 

less shrank not from flouting reason in the realm of faith: 
"I believe, because it is absurd." Luther, while granting 
the value of reason in morals and even while inferring 
on rational grounds the existence of an eternal divine 
being, called reason a harlot when it claimed to discern 
and judge the higher " things of the Spirit." Reason 
has only a negative place in religion. It comprehends 
what God is not, but cannot comprehend what God is. 
Therefore Luther could still believe in the saving efficacy 
of sacraments, though reason denied it. Nothing is 
more common in great popular revivals of religion than 
to find people under the power of torrents of emotion 
scouting all appeals to consistent reflection because they 
feel themselves carried into a realm that reason cannot 
reach. 

It is when people attempt to explain their religion 
or to justify it by bringing it into relation to the common 
conditions of life that they get into trouble. For to 
explain it is to rationalize it. This is precisely what is 
attempted in theology. The effort to interpret one's 
religion is an effort to assign to it an orderly and constant 
place in the spiritual world to which we belong. The 
attempt to prove the occurrence of a miracle or explain 
the significance of a miracle is, in effect, an attempt to 
show that, so far from its being an inexplicable or wanton 
occurrence, it conveys an intelligible meaning to us; 
that is, the belief in it is rational. The same is true of 
the attempt to establish or expound the truth of a revela- 
tion. Indeed, all theorizing in support of religion is of 
the nature of an attempt to naturalize the supernatural 
in our thinking, to make the sway of reason coextensive 
with the experience of the highest realities. No wonder, 



120 What Is Christianity? 

therefore, that this should result in testing religion by 
the canons of thought and in tracing its origin, in part 
at least, to thought. 

It has come about somewhat naturally that in the 
histories of rationalism, its critical — particularly nega- 
tively critical — side has received the emphasis. In the 
progress of Christianity rationalism has attacked the 
superstitions and immoralities of paganism and prepared 
the way for the higher faith. It has appeared as a 
protest against the dim, dreamy, and indescribable self- 
contemplation of the mystics or as a reaction against 
the hallucinations, visions, trances, or absurdities of a 
crude and enthusiastic revivalism. It has attacked the 
sacerdotalism and sacramentalism that constitute the 
Catholic system and prepared the way for a Protestant- 
ism that dissolved that system. It has turned upon the 
Protestantism that it helped to create and has under- 
mined its professions of a supernatural authority for its 
doctrines. Or, again, it has pricked the bubbles of a 
soaring speculation and exposed its vacuity. One might 
almost say that the rationalist is he who claims to be the 
exponent of "common sense," were it not that in seeking 
so persistently to explain he ends so often by explaining 
away. Rationalism seems to feed on other systems. 

If we seek to reduce the contentions of rationalism 
to their ultimate basis we may say that they repose on 
three pillars: first, the constancy and value of the 
natural order of the universe; second, the competency 
of the human mind to discover that order; third, the 
adequacy of this discovery for our practical needs. The 
first of these is commonly admitted to be an assumption 
underlying science and philosophy in their final sweep. 



Rationalism 121 

There is a universe; two universes are an impossibility. 
This universe embraces all objects of possible knowledge, 
whether they be presented to us by external perception 
or by introspection. It is a universe in which change is 
observed, but the changes are continuous and regular. 
It is a universe of a developing order. If we distinguish 
the spiritual order from the material order, nevertheless, 
in the end, both are reducible to one, which we may call 
the order of nature. But when it comes to the question 
of the method of procedure in discovering that order, the 
question remains open whether we shall proceed from a 
knowledge of the spiritual to the material, or the reverse. 
The second assumption flows from the first, since an 
order of nature undiscoverable by us has no meaning for 
us. If the world has a meaning for us we must be com- 
petent to discover it. The mind knows only that which 
it discovers. The third assumption is the logical infer- 
ence from the other two. We live in the universe and 
our practice must accord with its character if life is not 
to be futile. Rationalism, therefore, reposes on a con- 
fidence in the capacity of the human mind, in the exer- 
cise of its native powers of knowledge, to supply safe 
and adequate direction to life. Religious rationalism, 
as a theory, is that interpretation of the material and 
spiritual worlds which regards them as expressing in the 
inner soul or consciousness of man the realities of the 
religious life; that is to say, the universe discloses to 
man the essential relations in which he stands to the 
Supreme Being — whatever these words may mean. 
Christian rationalism regards this rational interpretation 
of the universe as the same in content with the essential 
doctrines of Christianity. 



122 What Is Christianity ? 

I. RATIONALISM IN HISTORICAL CHRISTIANITY 

In tracing the growth of the historical forms of the 
Christian faith one cannot avoid the recognition of the 
fact that the rationalistic attitude has always been a 
powerful factor. Even if many of the historic expres- 
sions of the faith have been seemingly without any marks 
of regard for the common reason of men, in the end 
they have always been obliged to give an account of 
themselves at its bar. For example, Christians have 
always believed that they were in possession of a revela- 
tion from God, and in times of spontaneous utterance 
of the deepest feelings that men can experience multi- 
tudes will claim that they have received a personal revela- 
tion. It was so in the first century of our era. But at 
such times there has always been some Paul to come 
forward bringing along with his acknowledgment that 
the revelation was real the demand that it be expressed 
in an orderly manner: "When ye come together, each 
one hath a psalm, hath a teaching, hath a revelation, 
hath a tongue, hath an interpretation. Let all things 

be done unto edifying If there be no interpreter, 

let him keep silence in the church The spirits 

of the prophets are subject to the prophets; for God is 
not a God of confusion." "In the church I had rather 
speak five words with my understanding than ten thou- 
sand words in a tongue." Christians usually have felt 
bound in the end to justify their belief in a revelation 
by showing that it is in keeping with the nature of all 
knowledge and to that extent, at least, is rational. 
Christians have always believed also in miracles, but 
they have felt compelled to justify the belief in the reality 
of miracles by showing that there is credible testimony 



Rationalism 1 23 

to their occurrence and that they meet a true need. 
This is just a way of saying that the belief is in accord 
with rational knowledge. To many this seems equiva- 
lent to the substitution of reason for revelation and 
miracle, or else an acknowledgment that the true revela- 
tion and the true miracle is reason. Let us glance 
rapidly down through the ages in which our present 
faith was in the making and see if it be so. 

Judaism supplied the soil for the original planting of 
the Christian gospel. How variegated were the forms 
of Jewish religious life — the prophetic fire, the priestly 
love for the form of worship, the seer's forecast of terrible 
judgments ! But the rhapsody of the prophet, the ritual 
of the priest, and the apocalypses of the seer were toned 
down by the sober sense of the sage. The Wisdom books 
are monumental of the tardy recognition of the truth 
that men can arrive at the happiness for which they seek 
in no other way than by an intelligent acquaintance with 
the laws of the orderly life and a hearty obedience to 
them. To be sure, with the Jews all the laws of life were 
regarded as the commandments of their God, and they 
never descended to mere moralism. At times their reli- 
gious rationalism takes on a tone of sublime contempla- 
tion, as when the sage turns his gaze upon the wonders 
of the heavens or, again, upon the equal wonders of the 
human heart: "The heavens declare the glory of God, 
and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto 
day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth 
knowledge The law of the Lord is perfect, restor- 
ing the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making 
wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, 
rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is 



124 What Is Christianity? 

pure, enlightening the eyes." To such men as this 
psalmist the world without and the world within answer 
to each other and together they utter the will of their 
God. Sometimes, as in portions of the Proverbs, this 
religious rationalism assumes a lower tone. The wise 
man may be wise only in the sense of having a shrewd 
appreciation of the laws of the orderly life because he 
can make them serve his self-interest. Does this mark 
an inherent defect in rationalism — a tendency to a 
narrow moralism? 

The traces of rationalism in the New Testament are 
few and of minor importance. The appeal to the natural 
human judgment is not wanting. James extols the 
worth of genuine morality and Paul has a touch of natural 
theology: "That which is known of God is manifest in 
men; for God manifested it unto them. For the invis- 
ible things of him from the creation of the world are 
clearly seen, being perceived through the things that 
are made." But the overpowering impression of the 
personality of Jesus, the tragedy of his death, the triumph 
of his resurrection, and the new consciousness of power 
and of enlightenment in the hearts of his followers over- 
shadowed all else. They were too much occupied with 
the impending cataclysm in human affairs and the uni- 
verse to give themselves to the problems of the systematic 
thinker. 

It was not long, however, before the attempt was 
made to construe in a rationalistic manner the Christian 
revelation itself and the miracles that accompanied it. 
As the gospel spread among the Graeco-Roman peoples, 
it attracted to it men of sobriety and learning, who hailed 
the Christian message with joy because it seemed to them 



Rationalism 125 

to bring back to life and vigor again those fundamental 
principles of morality that had been obscured or lost 
amid the social confusion of those times. The old philos- 
ophies had failed to give men the saving truth. Here 
was a new philosophy which was also the most ancient, 
for the Scriptures that contained it came from the earliest 
ages, by which confidence in the eternal distinction of 
right from wrong and in the eternal consequences of 
obedience and disobedience might be restored. They 
accepted Christianity as the revelation of the true 
morality. It was the affirmation of the true morality 
because it was the announcement of the knowledge of the 
true God by him who came from God. Holding to the 
philosophic principle of the Logos (the principle of 
reason immanent in God and active in man and the 
world), they said that the teaching of Jesus was one in 
substance and purport with the expression of the Logos. 
In truth, he it is who was originally the Logos of God, 
who became personal before the creation, who himself 
framed the world and the rational beings in it, and who 
at length "took shape, became a man, and was called 
Jesus Christ." The prophecies that foretold his coming 
and his acts and the miracles which he and his followers 
performed attest the truth of his teachings. Chris- 
tianity, then, is essentially the true teaching, the divine 
doctrine, the inculcation of " the excellences which reside 
in him [God], temperance, and justice, and philanthropy, 
and as many virtues as are peculiar to a God who is 
called by no proper name" — in a word, moralism. By 
our concrete rationality we are able to receive a knowl- 
edge of his will: "In order that we may follow those 
things that please him, choosing them by means of the 



126 What Is Christianity? 

rational faculties he has himself endowed us with, he 
both persuades us and leads us to faith." And, accord- 
ingly, "each man goes to everlasting punishment or 
salvation according to the value of his actions." 

These apologists were really the founders of formal 
Christian theology. They tried to show that Christian 
faith was the belief and practice of those eternal prin- 
ciples of conduct which are identical in character and 
aim with that rational nature which is found in man 
and the universe. It may be fairly said, therefore, that 
the formal traditional theology began with a type of 
rationalism. 

This early rationalism was soon overshadowed by 
the mystical and metaphysical interpretation of the 
ancient Catholic theologians — not without a struggle, 
however. For the growing orthodoxy found itself con- 
fronted by powerful opponents, conspicuous among 
whom were Arius and Pelagius. It is not possible here 
to exhibit the debate or expound the positions at length. 
Arianism, in short, stood for a conservative Logos doc- 
trine. Its logic demanded the eternal validity of the 
distinction between the one true and only God and all 
else, including the Logos, the only begotten Son. If the 
Son was begotten, he had a beginning and was a creation 
of God. In the incarnate Christ the Logos takes the 
place of the rational human spirit. He mediated the 
revelation of God to men. Arian rationalism attempted 
to maintain a logical view of the relation of monotheism 
to belief in the revelation given to men in Christ. 

Pelagianism was a protest against the Augustinian 
view of sin and grace which was adopted in part by 
Catholicism. It opposed the doctrine of original sin, 



Rationalism 127 

bondage of the will, universal human depravity, and 
absolute dependence on grace ministered in the sacra- 
ments. God is good and so also is man fundamentally. 
Man is free by nature and remains so. If he sins, it is 
always by choice and not by necessity. As he is capable 
of evil, so is he also capable of good. As he chooses evil 
by free choice, so also he chooses good freely. God's 
grace assists and does not compel. The revelation of 
Christ enlightens our minds as truth and aids our will 
by love. Life is a discipline and its outcome is self- 
determined and deserved. As Arianism attempted a 
rational view of the relation of God to men with respect 
to positive religion, Pelagianism attempted a rational 
view of the relation of God to men with respect to positive 
righteousness or goodness. 

The darkness that fell upon Europe in the ages 
between the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise 
of the mediaeval empire began to pass away with the 
institution of the schools of Charlemagne and the monks 
and the awakening of interest in the ancient life of the 
East through the Crusades. The founding of the great 
European universities dates back to this time. The 
rescue of the precious documents of ancient Greek and 
Christian lore from the hand of the marauding Turk and 
the translation of them into the vernacular gave to the 
ecclesiastical scholars of the West a new vision. They 
became acquainted with the philosophy of Aristotle. 
The scientific and philosophic interest was aroused. 
Heretofore the saving dogmas of the Christian faith had 
been received with the same docile spirit with which 
men had received the ritual of the church — on authority. 
Why not strengthen the hold of the dogmas on men's 



128 What Is Christianity? 

minds by giving them the support of reason ? Why not 
prove that what is true by the authority of the church 
is also true by the authority of reason ? If the church 
and reason speak with one voice, who can dispute their 
dogmas ? The circumstances of the time threw out the 
challenge and there was at least a show of accepting it. 
Scholasticism, the philosophy of the church schools, was 
an attempt to rationalize the traditional faith by the 
aid of Greek philosophy. 

In a preceding chapter reference was made to a 
powerful religious movement of the Middle Ages that 
flourished outside the church and threatened its power. 
Here is a parallel movement that began mainly under 
ecclesiastical control. But who could be sure that it 
would remain there? What if human reason and a 
supposed divine authority could not be made to concur ? 
What if they should turn out to be two steeds that tend 
to run apart? Then the rider must make his choice. 
So it was with the scholastic in the end. The enterprise 
was undertaken with boldness and acclaim. The famous 
Anselm offered his demonstration of the necessary 
existence of God and proceeded to justify also the dogma 
of the incarnation, the central dogma of Catholicism, 
on the ground of rational necessity. Others followed in 
his footsteps until the great Thomas Aquinas outlined 
a whole system of dogmas rationally grounded. But 
doubt was also stimulated. The keen wit of Abelard 
exhibited in his Sic et Non ("Yes and No") the hopeless 
contradictions in the Fathers to whose authority the 
church had deferred. John Duns Scotus showed that 
reason could not be made to give its free assent to the 
dogmas. Gradually the failure became patent. The 



Rationalism 129 

church had to place its dogmas on a height inaccessible 
to reason in order to save them. The situation in the 
Catholic church is virtually the same at this present time. 
Modernism has been trying in vain to restore to human 
thinking its right, but without success. Roman Catholic 
Christianity is the Christianity of authoritative dogmas 
that defy reason. Rationalism can only be sporadic in 
Catholicism. 

In Protestantism conditions are quite different. For 
the Reformation owed its birth, in part, to the new learn- 
ing. It was unable to live without a recognition of the 
inexpugnable rights of human reason. Its friends were 
able to defend it successfully by affirming the right of 
the individual intelligence to interpret the will of God 
for itself and by virtue of its inherent worth. The right 
to interpret the will of God embraced the right to deter- 
mine what is the will of God. The principle of rational 
criticism in its whole range was thereby secured. No 
matter if the Reformation theologians sought to limit 
the trustworthiness of reason in the religious realm by 
means of the doctrine of original sin, they had spoken 
the word that could not be withdrawn. The Reforma- 
tion was a struggle for intellectual freedom as well as 
for moral purity and religious assurance. Personal faith 
and personal intelligence were wedded in the soul of the 
Protestant and could never be divorced without damage 
to one or both of them. 

On its intellectual side the Reformation was more 
than a declaration of the right to freedom. It also issued 
a challenge to the human mind to carry its right into 
execution. The whole world of knowledge was thrown 
open for exploration. A mighty stimulus was given to 



130 What Is Christianity ? 

investigation in all directions. Many there were who 
gladly accepted the challenge. All truth was to be 
man's. But there was little preparation or mental 
equipment for the great task. It was one thing to 
declare that we can know and quite another thing to 
explain the steps by which we get possession of the facts 
of the universe or to vindicate the trustworthiness of 
the knowing process by exhibiting its constituent factors. 
As soon as the vastness of the regions waiting to be 
explored began to dawn on men's minds it was inevitable 
that a period of uncertainty and skepticism should 
supervene upon the glorious feeling of exaltation and 
relief that came with the Reformation. 

The coming of a period of doubt was hastened and its 
character aggravated by the hastiness of the Protestant 
theologians in laying down statements of the essential 
doctrines of the Christian faith. Driven by the exi- 
gencies of ecclesiastical and political strife, they took 
a short cut to a settlement of questions of religious con- 
troversy. Answers to the profoundest questions that 
the human soul can ask were prescribed and enforced. 
Their doctrines were not meant to be provisional hypoth- 
eses or temporary aids to conduct, but authoritative 
declarations of divine truth. To the question, How 
were these truths communicated to man ? the answer 
was, By revelation. To the question, Where is this 
revelation to be found? the answer was, In the Bible. 
And to the question, How do we know that the professed 
revelation is real ? the answer of the ancient apologists 
was given, By the evidence of miracles, including proph- 
ecy. The last answer directed attention to a rational 
test, namely, the discovery, sifting, and weighing of 



Rationalism 131 

evidence, and it prepared the way for the undermining 
of the whole structure. 

It was not possible for Protestants to follow the 
Catholic example by falling back on institutional author- 
ity. That door they had closed to themselves. The 
problem of knowledge, when once accepted, had to be 
worked out. The repeated efforts to define and redefine 
their doctrines so as to remove stumblingblocks to 
reason prove that the insistence of the demands of reason 
was felt. The failure of Protestant persecution to sup- 
press doubt showed that there was no escaping the issues. 
Reason must be satisfied if faith is to live and triumph. 
This is a categorical imperative of the Protestant reli- 
gious mind. Consequently we find, as we might have 
expected to find, in Protestant history the continual 
reappearing of rationalistic movements that sought, 
when faith and reason could not be made to speak in 
unison or in harmony, to subordinate faith to reason 
and to limit religion to the domain prescribed for her 
by the logical understanding. It is not possible to 
sketch in the present connection the various types of 
rationalism that have appeared in the history of Prot- 
estantism. Our references will be confined to those 
forms of rationalism that serve best to exhibit its general 
character. 

2. THE PRINCIPLES AND DOGMAS OF RATIONALISM 

The vast range of the rationalistic movement and 
the great number of the works of its noted representatives 
have given rationalism an exceedingly respectable place 
in the constitution of the modern Protestant religious 
mind. We shall now attempt to present an analysis 



132 What Is Christianity? 

and brief exposition of its fundamental views by review- 
ing the positions of some of its representative thinkers. 
We shall consider first the Socinians. Laelius and 
Faustus Socinus, uncle and nephew, came directly under 
the influence of Calvin, the first of the two being an 
intimate friend of the great theologian. Intellectually 
they were of the same type as he, as keen and relentless 
as he in their logic. They followed him in his idea of a 
revelation of God given to the reason of man through 
nature and also in his rational demonstration of the 
authority of Scripture, but significantly passed by that 
"secret testimony of the Spirit" to which he finally 
appealed. Like him, they viewed the Scriptures as a 
divinely given lawbook, but, unlike him, they distin- 
guished thoroughly the New Testament from the Old 
Testament as the authority for Christian doctrine and, 
unlike him again, they found no place in the Scriptures 
for the great pillars of orthodox theology, the Trinity, 
the absolute deity of Christ, original sin, bondage of the 
will, foreordination, or atonement by penal substitution. 
To them the Christian religion was "the way of attain- 
ing to eternal life," that is, "the method of serving God 
which he has himself delivered through Jesus Christ." 
In short, Christianity was the revelation of the supreme 
law of life by obeying which men should be saved, a 
system of morality. The significant thing in Socinian- 
ism was not, however, the specific doctrines they held, 
but the ultimate basis for believing these doctrines. 
This, in short, they called "right reason." They said, 
"Without it we could neither perceive with certainty the 
authority of the sacred writings, understand their con- 
tents, discriminate one thing from another, nor apply 



Rationalism 133 

them to any practical purpose." Nothing was to be 
received "which is repugnant to the written word of 
God, or to sound reason." In the end, the Scriptures are 
to be believed because of their rationality. It mattered 
little, then, what particular doctrines they accepted or 
rejected, and it mattered little that their exegesis was 
often more accurate than the orthodox exegesis or that 
sometimes it was warped by their preferences, so long 
as the determinative factor in all religion was just this: 
that which it is rational to believe. Christianity was 
true because it was rational. Its teachings commended 
themselves to the human judgment and produced the 
"proper effects," that is, "a suitable and exemplary 
conduct." Christianity was practically a system of 
morality based on right reason. 

The Socinians might be put down by force, but the 
leaven was working. When Hugo Grotius, the great 
Dutch jurist, attempted to vindicate the Protestant 
view of the atonement against them, he failed to hold to 
the strict orthodox teaching and himself fell back on a 
system of natural human law found in the laws of nations; 
he made that the basis of a theory of atonement, which 
he represented as a manifestation of rectoral or govern- 
mental justice, that is, such a kind of justice as appeals 
to the moral reason of humanity. Almost a generation 
before him, James Arminius, the famous theologian of 
Amsterdam, made his plea for a milder view of predes- 
tination in order to secure recognition of the worth of 
the human will and its freedom. The spirit was infec- 
tious. Other Dutch thinkers tried to mediate between 
opposing schools of theology by seeking to formulate 
the views held by Christians in common as the essential 



134 What Is Christianity? 

Christian doctrines, all else being secondary. But how 
was this to be settled unless by the judgment of man ? 
And this amounted to only an inkling of what was com- 
ing. Orthodoxy soon found itself righting for its life, 
not against protests here or there, but against a great 
body of thought that seemed, at least, to be scientifically 
and philosophically grounded. 

There were two great parallel movements of thought 
that held the attention of Europe for the greater part 
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The one 
was inaugurated in England by Bacon and Locke and 
culminated in the philosophic skepticism of Hume on 
the one hand and the philosophic faith of Butler on the 
other hand. The other movement was inaugurated on 
the Continent by Descartes and, passing through the 
crucible of Kant's Critique, issued in the Hegelian logic. 
The one was animated by the spirit of critical inquiry, 
the other by the spirit of speculation. Both were 
grounded in the Protestant confidence in the power of 
the human mind to know reality. 

Bacon and Locke were most deeply concerned with 
moral and religious aims, and attempted the discovery 
of the relations between God, man, and nature, in order 
to the fulfilment of the duties of life. With this end in 
view both sought to formulate a method of knowledge 
— the one by allowing external nature to speak to the 
human mind through her facts independently of all 
philosophical presuppositions or personal preferences, 
the other by a similar observation of the facts of inner 
experience. Both inaugurated movements that have 
continued to the present, and both arrived at a natural 
theology and sought to retain their traditional respect 



Rationalism 135 

for revealed Christianity by maintaining a distinction 
between natural theology and supernatural theology, 
or revelation. But the followers of both carried their 
principles to conclusions that would have alarmed them. 
Men ever seek a unitary foundation for their faith and 
choose that which impresses them the most. 

The great achievements of Sir Isaac Newton in his 
scientific study of the laws of nature gave an immense 
impetus to the desire to wrest from the objective uni- 
verse a disclosure of the character of that Being from 
whose hand she came and of the relation in which he has 
willed that man should stand to himself. Such a doc- 
trine would constitute a religion trustworthy, dignified, 
and permanent, in contrast with the vagaries, super- 
stitions, and absurdities so characteristic of traditional 
faiths. Such a religion could not be dependent on those 
external and extraordinary occurrences which men call 
miracles or special revelations, or, if men still held to 
such special revelations, these must be brought into 
conformity with nature's universal "revelation." This 
religion of nature comes to noble utterance in Addison's 
great hymn, the first and last stanzas of which are here 

quoted : 

The spacious firmament on high 
With all the blue ethereal sky 
And spangled heavens, a shining frame, 
Their great Original proclaim. 

In reason's ear they all rejoice 
And utter forth a glorious voice, 
Forever singing, as they shine, 
"The hand that made us is divine." 

Locke made out by his method of psychical intro- 
spection that the whole body of our knowledge arises 



136 What Is Christianity? 

from sensation and reflection and by the combinations 
we make of the ideas received in this way, and that it is 
not in any degree dependent on the falsely imagined 
"innate ideas " that are not subject to test or proof. The 
result is on the one hand the dependence of the mind 
for its ideas of God upon the impressions which the 
external world makes on our senses, and on the other 
hand a logical repudiation of miracles and reputed special 
revelations. The canons of the rational intelligence 
again become the touchstone of all professed revelations. 
Like Bacon, he sought to guard his followers against a 
rejection of Christianity by distinguishing between 
reason and faith. The former gives rational, funda- 
mental truths; the latter supplies super-rational truths 
to be received by faith. He regarded Christianity as 
embracing truths of the latter kind and wrote a work 
entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered 
in the Scriptures; but his " Christianity " was an original, 
simple, rational faith whose revelations stood the test 
of reason. I quote his own words setting forth his views 
of the relation of this revelation to reason: 

Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of 
light and Fountain of all knowledge communicates to all mankind 
that portion of truth which he has laid within reach of their 
natural faculties; revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new 
set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason 
vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives that 
they come from God. 

The principles of Bacon and Locke carried the major- 
ity of religious thinkers along with them. But a cleavage 
soon appeared. On the one side were those who sought 
to carry these principles to the logical conclusion by a 
rejection of all special revelation, and on the other side 



Rationalism 137 

were those whose affection for the traditional faith led 
them to try to maintain, with Bacon and Locke, a faith 
in special revelation as seen in certain Christian doctrines. 
Both believed in the primacy of natural theology or 
rational religion, and both, for a time at least, claimed 
to be Christian; but they differed as to the quantum 
of doctrine that is to be regarded as fundamentally 
Christian. The one side naturally attacked the miracles 
and the other side defended them as the stronghold of 
orthodoxy. The story of the progress of the criticism 
of the Christian Scripture need not delay us here. The 
stress of controversy drove the first class (who came to 
be known as Deists) toward a rejection of all belief in a 
religion of fellowship with God, while it drove the others 
to acknowledge, as Butler did, that Christianity is "a 
republication of the religion of nature," necessitated 
through the darkness caused by sin, plus certain other 
doctrines which were necessary in order to meet the 
needs of sinners. Both were rationalists at heart. 

The parallel movement on the Continent began with 
Descartes' Cogito, ergo sum. Proceeding by eliminating, 
first of all, everything that could be doubted, he found 
at last a limit to the possibility of doubt in the very laws 
of thought. Then he proceeded to find in thought the 
determination of the laws of real existence. That which 
is necessary to thought necessarily is. Arguing from 
the necessary connection between cause and effect, he 
posited God as the ultimate and only real cause or sub- 
stance. From this substance flow the secondary sub- 
stances of mind and body or thought and matter, whose 
phenomena correspond to each other. This makes our 
knowledge real. Spinoza carried Descartes' position 



138 What Is Christianity? 

farther and by the same necessity of thought predicated 
the one only, infinite, self-existent substance, which is 
God. By immanent necessity it expresses itself in two 
secondary substances, thought and extension, which are 
only two out of the infinite number of the divine attri- 
butes. Finite things are only temporary modes of the 
divine self-expression, and by the same necessity by 
which they flow from God they return to God again. 
The whole world becomes the expression of the divine 
perfection or goodness. When Hegel at a much later 
date sought to unfold a philosophy of religion, of his- 
tory, and of all existence by the immanent necessity of 
thought, he was repeating Spinoza's achievement, though 
in a different way. He was developing the premises of 
rationalism to their inevitable conclusion. The whole 
of religion is dominated by the authority of the Idea. 
The Christian verities are transmuted into a system of 
logical concepts evolved by the inner necessity of 
thought. 

Between these two great thinkers there occurred a 
large number of less pretentious efforts to reduce the 
truths of the Christian religion to the terms of clear 
thinking. It was hoped to vindicate belief in the chief 
Christian doctrines by expounding them in the terms 
of the popular philosophy. It was the age of the En- 
lightenment. Clearness is the test and certificate of 
truth. Obscurity, confusion, is falsehood or error. All 
in Christianity that did not correspond with the current 
doctrine of the world was explained away or regarded 
as not essentially Christian. The Scriptures were sub- 
jected to a criticism like that which was in vogue in 
England. Revelation was identical in its essence with the 



Rationalism 139 

impartation of true knowledge. The language of Lessing 

in his Education of the Human Race is pertinent here : 

That which is education as respects the individual is revela- 
tion as respects the race. Education is revelation imparted to 
the individual and revelation is education which has been and is 
still being imparted to the human race. Education gives the man 
nothing which he could not also have of himself; only it gives more 
quickly and more easily that which he could have of himself. 
Similarly, revelation gives the human race nothing whereunto 
human reason, if left to itself, could not also attain, but gave and 
gives to it the most important of these things, only earlier. 

The rationalism of the Continent agreed with the 
rationalism of England in reducing the essential doctrines 
of Christianity to the outlines of a "natural religion" or 
"rational theology." As the Deists of England made 
Christianity equivalent to a belief in the existence of a 
supreme rational Being whose will man must obey, the 
terms of a moral law in accord with "nature," with its 
rewards and punishments, and the certainty of a future 
life, so Kant enunciated for Continental rationalism the 
doctrines of essential religion (Christianity) to which all 
other doctrines of religion are reducible. They are the 
three great postulates of the practical reason: God, 
freedom, and immortality. 

Briefly, then, the position of modern Christian 
rationalism may be stated as follows: It is built upon 
the foundations of the orthodox Protestant apologetics. 
Christianity is to be believed because it is true. Its 
truth is its doctrines. Doctrines are products of thought. 
All true thinking corresponds with the laws of the uni- 
verse, which have the same source. Those doctrines of 
religion are alone true that are consistent with the truths 
of reason or right thinking. The illogical is the false. 



140 What Is Christianity? 

True Christianity, then, is identical with a rational faith. 
All those features of traditional Christianity which con- 
flict with nature's laws are only adventitious and are 
to be set aside as nonessential. All the duties which a 
true Christianity enjoins are such duties as arise from a 
rational interpretation of man's relation to the laws of 
nature which are the laws of God — Christianity is 
natural morality. The great edifice of traditional dog- 
mas, sacraments, and institutions crumbles, and instead 
we have the simple faith that holds the existence of an 
infinite God, the eternal validity of the moral law, reward 
and punishment for obedience, and a life beyond the 
grave where these are given. 

3. A BRIEF ESTIMATE OF CHRISTIAN RATIONALISM 

We shall first estimate it in relation to the rival inter- 
pretations of Christianity already expounded. 

1. As against Apocalypticism: While Apocalyp- 
ticism is highly emotional and appeals strongly to the 
imagination of the common man with its preference for 
the picturesque and the tragical, rationalism is reflective, 
eschews the extraordinary and the inexplicable, and tends 
to reduce everything to the level of the common and the 
orderly. Apocalypticism makes much of inspiration and 
revelation, while rationalism holds to the superior value 
of the normal action of intelligence and " reason." 
Apocalypticism appeals to the supernatural as the extra- 
and even the contra-natural; rationalism regards the 
natural as the fundamental and the true. Apocalyp- 
ticism is pessimistic as to the physical universe and the 
ordinary course of human affairs, but rationalism is 
optimistic in regard to nature and exalts the value of 



Rationalism 141 

natural morality as against a derogatory view of the 
natural man. Apocalypticism represents the faith of 
the downtrodden, the suffering, the baffled and beaten 
ones of our world whose only hope for victory over 
opposing powers lies in the intervention of almighty 
God; it is an application of this hope to the Christian 
faith in Jesus ; but rationalism is the faith of those who 
have found the world a comfortable place to live in. 

2. As against Catholicism: While Catholicism is 
institutional, proclaims a universal external order, and 
rests its faith on official authority, rationalism is indi- 
vidualistic, tends to liberate men from institutional 
control, and is wanting in the power to create a firm 
bond of community life. While Catholicism, as re- 
spects its inner life, is emotional, loves the sensuous, 
the mysterious, and the symbolical, but is intellec- 
tually indifferent, rationalism is intellectual, plain, and 
matter-of-fact, and loves knowledge for its own sake. 
While the morality of Catholicism is ascetical, the moral- 
ity of rationalism consists in loyalty to the dictates of 
the common conscience — the morality of "common 
sense." In short, while Catholic Christianity is a reli- 
gion of devotion to visions of another world beyond the 
present, rationalistic Christianity is devoted to the task 
of making the present world better. 

3. As against mysticism: While both mysticism and 
rationalism seek for the simple essence of the Christian 
faith and endeavor to eliminate all adventitious forms 
or foreign accretions from whatever source, they are to 
be contrasted in that mysticism seeks its end in the realm 
of feeling, but rationalism in the realm of thought. 
Mysticism is receptive, almost passive, finds its good 



142 What Is Christianity? 

by the way of contemplation, and discovers the One and 
All by abandonment of the many; rationalism is intel- 
lectually active, inquisitive, analytical in temper, and 
finds the solution of its problems in a scientific study of 
the many. Mysticism is an aristocratic faith, while 
rationalism is, professedly at least, democratic. Mys- 
ticism tends toward a pessimistic view of the prospects 
of the human multitudes, rationalism toward an opti- 
mistic view. 

4. As against Protestantism: Rationalism is Prot- 
estantism disrobed of its confidence in the accuracy of 
those marvelous traditions in which it trusted to have 
found its life. It is Protestantism shorn of its elaborate 
scheme of doctrines in exposition of a theory of divine 
government. It is Protestant intelligence, self-conscious, 
clear, and acute, disconnected with the yearning of 
Protestantism for a deeper sense of what it loved to call 
the grace of God and its sense of the value of a human 
soul. It is Protestant doctrinalism without the Prot- 
estant devout feeling of being the subject of a divine 
revelation. At the same time rationalism is Protestant- 
ism become intensely conscientious as respects its intel- 
lectual processes, made more sympathetic toward all 
seekers of truth, and made more fully aware that the 
world in which it lives here and now is a well-ordered 
and beneficent world. It is Protestantism freed from 
that dread of science which was the baneful inheritance 
received from Catholicism. 

In the next place, rationalism is to be judged in its 
own right apart from these other types of professed 
Christianity. A few suggestions only can be offered in 
this article. Rationalism has the merit of insisting that 



Rationalism 143 

the universe is a unit — this world and the next, earth and 
heaven, are inseparable and are governed by the same 
laws. The truly moral life is truly natural to man, and 
the most truly natural is the only supernatural. The 
whole universe is as sacred as any part of it. Religion 
and morality are ultimately one. The universe is a 
field of moral discipline, and science is a product of the 
moral imperative. If Christianity is true, it must be 
true to the universe. 

But rationalism as a type of Christian theory is 
dependent on those historical forms of Christianity 
which it criticizes. It is critical rather than creative. 
It bases its interpretation of Christianity on assumptions 
derived from speculation and not from the Christian 
traditions. Hence these traditions are a problem rather 
than a source of comfort. Rationalism is accurate in 
aim, but is cold and forbidding to the tempted and tried. 
It may be free from hallucinations, but it lacks inspira- 
tion. It may be free from fanaticism, but it is lacking 
in the spirit of religious enterprise. While it seeks to 
satisfy the demands of intelligence it cannot arouse deep 
emotion or enthusiasm in the masses. It is ultimately 
aristocratic. 



CHAPTER VI 

EVANGELICISM OR MODERNIZED PROTESTANT 
CHRISTIANITY 

The term " evangelicism " is here used to designate 
the character of a development of the Christian religion 
which is distinctly modern but which has roots reaching 
far back into the past. It is not meant thereby that a 
new religious denomination has arisen or that even a 
new school of thought deserves a name for itself. We 
do not seem to be suffering particularly from a dearth of 
organizations or new theories. But recent times have 
witnessed the emergence of a new type of Christian life 
and thought which seems to be so charged with a message 
of good to the world that a term which carries with it the 
idea of loyalty to such a message may be fitly applied 
to it. The aim of the present article is to trace the influ- 
ences formative of it and to indicate its main features. 

I. SOME CONSTRUCTIVE RELIGIOUS FORCES IN MODERN 

CHRISTIANITY 

The period of the ecclesiastico-political revolution we 
call the Protestant Reformation virtually came to a close 
with the execution of King Charles the First of England 
and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia about two 
hundred and seventy years ago. With the cessation 
of the "wars of religion" and the reaction against 
intolerance and violence, there ensued a period of indiffer- 
ence and general skepticism lasting about a century 

144 



Evangelicism 145 

more. Notwithstanding the fact that there were fertile 
oases here and there amid the general dearth, religious 
faith suffered from widespread sterility. Then, suddenly 
and unexpectedly, there came a change. The principal 
factors contributing to it are worthy of special mention. 
First in the order of merit is the eighteenth-century 
religious revival in America and Britain. In those try- 
ing days, when men were shaking themselves clear of 
the external forms of ritual or order or doctrine which 
earlier ages had supposed to be necessary to salvation, 
there were many faithful men who labored in quiet and 
obscurity to keep the smoldering fire of faith from going 
out. To them must be traced the revival of the con- 
sciousness of an indisputable personal participation in 
the higher moral and religious life apart from outward 
forms, but it was not until men like Jonathan Edwards, 
George Whitefield, and John Wesley brought to it the 
needed zeal, intelligence, and skill united that it burst 
into a fiery flame. There came an outbreak of religious 
feeling that defied the intellectual canons of rationalism 
and of orthodoxy alike and swept on through the whole 
Anglo-Saxon world with irresistible force. As all great 
revivals, it gained its first impetus by winning the hearts 
of the working people, the poor, the neglected, and the 
defeated, but, despite scoffing and ridicule, it gradually 
conquered the respect of the prosperous and intelligent. 
Instead of wasting away in emotionalism, the revival, 
under the statesmanlike leadership of Wesley and his 
faithful coadjutors in various communions, kept adding 
to its initial impulse and became a permanent force of 
great importance in modern Protestantism. Since those 
earlier days of revivalism there have been considerable 



146 What Is Christianity ? 

intervals of dearth, and sometimes it has degenerated 
into selfish professionalism or hypocritical sentimental- 
ism, but the yearning for the conversion of men from 
their sins and the effort to better their whole condition 
by the ministries of religion continue unabated. 

The revival was characterized by the union of deep 
feeling with moral resolution. There was a return of 
Puritanism on its moral side. The danger of fanaticism 
was balanced by the insistence on inner and outer purity 
of life. For the " judicial righteousness" of earlier 
Calvinism was substituted the actual righteousness of 
positive personal goodness. If the preachers in their 
denunciation of sins condemned sometimes the innocent 
with the guilty, they succeeded at least in rousing the 
consciences of men to action and doomed to death the 
antinomianism that had been eating out the heart of 
orthodoxy. Personal purity was a demand for the 
present life and was not to be postponed to the day of 
the soul's separation from the body. This is probably 
the import of John Wesley's doctrine of Christian per- 
fection or perfect love in this life. The Christian salva- 
tion was to be a present reality, the conscious possession 
of an enlightened heart. 

The spirit of philanthropy was quickened and 
broadened. The great public wrongs under which men 
were suffering began to call loudly for remedy. John 
Howard's crusade on behalf of the prisoners in the jails 
of Europe, efforts for the improvement of the criminal 
law in the direction of equity and humanity in penalties, 
the extinction of the slave trade, intervention on behalf 
of the " factory hands," the fight against the evils of 
strong drink, were all in part fruits of the revival. Not- 



Evangelicism 147 

withstanding the emphasis placed on the hope of heaven, 
men were evidently learning the worth of the earthly 
life as the sphere for the realization of the heavenly. A 
Protestant principle that had been half forgotten in the 
controversies and persecutions of earlier days was com- 
ing to vigorous renewal, namely, the unspeakable worth 
of the man. 

The progress of the revival was sustained throughout 
by the conviction that religion has its home in the soul of 
the individual. Its value and its truth are self-attesting, 
for God speaks to man directly. This was but a renewal 
of the Protestant view expressed in the oft-quoted 
affirmation of Calvin that the truth of God's word was 
certified to men by "the secret testimony of the Spirit." 
Only it was universalized. Every man was competent 
to enjoy this immediate certainty. The center of 
gravity in religion was shifted from objective facts, 
doctrines, or rites to the inner life — faith. Experience is 
the ultimate fact in the life of religion. Men who had 
"the witness of the Spirit" that they were forgiven, 
renewed, saved, possessed a basis of certainty that made 
the Calvinist doctrines of election and predestination 
unnecessary for many people and even a stumbling-block 
to the free personal faith of others. For when the com- 
mon man gains a "heart conviction" of the favor of 
God, he becomes independent of the artificial supports of 
fixed systems of any kind and resents their interference 
with his liberty. 

The tide of feeling swept over ecclesiastical and 
doctrinal bounds. In the long run it mattered little 
that John Wesley, a faithful priest of the Church of 
England, strove to keep his "societies" within the order 



148 What Is Christianity? 

established by law. His followers swung loose and 
organized the various Methodist " churches." It mat- 
tered little that he and Whitefield, with their followers, 
split on issues between Calvinists and Arminians. For 
both sides shared alike in the movement of grace, and 
after a time it became plain that the controversies 
between them were mostly side issues. All existing 
Protestant bodies shared the blessing, and new denom- 
inations of Christians were constantly arising as the 
movement spread. Many of these bodies have had a 
fairly fabulous growth. Hence, while the leaders and 
their followers professed conservative views, on the 
whole, in matters of theology, an era of ecclesiastical 
and theological freedom was being unconsciously ushered 
in and a stimulus given to reconstruction along all lines of 
life and thought. 

Equally significant of the new freedom was the spon- 
taneous outburst of Christian song. The Christian 
church has reason to be proud of its hymnody in almost 
all the periods of its history, despite much doggerel. 
There were noble Protestant hymnists in the days pre- 
ceding the revival. But the ritual of the Church of 
England, being stereotyped, was a sedative rather than 
an inspiration of religious action, and the public services 
of Nonconformists and Presbyterians both in America 
and in Britain were rather barren on the liturgical side. 
There was even controversy over the propriety of using 
"uninspired" productions in worship. Now all was 
changed. The new faith was sung into the hearts of the 
multitudes. The era of modern hymnody and religious 
music was ushered in. Charles Wesley alone composed 
over six thousand hymns. There were many other sweet 



Evangelicism 149 

singers in those days, though none so prolific as he. 
Most of these hymns have disappeared, but many remain 
as a permanent asset of the Christian faith. The reli- 
gious fruitage remains even after the hymns perish. 
Revivals of religion are always marked now by the 
presence of the singing evangelist. The new faith is 
strongly emotional everywhere. The range of emotions 
has widened, while the expression is more restrained. 
The main point in this connection is that the emphasis 
has been shifted from the forms of order or of doctrines 
to the feelings, and the theology that would expound 
the new faith must take cognizance of the change. 

The reawakening of the spirit of love for all men 
issued in the birth of the modern Protestant foreign 
missionary movement. When the far vision of William 
Carey gave to the churches the inspiration for ambitions 
and undertakings undreamed of before, the pent-up 
energies of Protestant religion, hitherto confined to 
narrow bits of territory, comparatively speaking, and 
barely holding its own against Catholicism in the long 
struggle for existence, were released from their bonds 
and developed enterprises whose story reads like a fairy 
tale, so wonderful was their success. Christianity has 
truly become a world-religion. Its frontiers are now 
in every land. The work was urged at first as a means of 
rescuing men universally from guilt and condemnation, 
but it has now become an attempt to build the Christian 
faith into the social, industrial, and civil fabric of the 
life of the peoples. The variety and magnitude of the 
labors involved, the new acquaintance with the multi- 
tudinous faiths of mankind, the necessity of interpreting 
the Christian faith in the presence of these faiths, the 



150 What Is Christianity? 

inevitable co-operation of Christians who in the home- 
land belonged to rival churches, and the association of 
the missionary with the work of the statesman and the 
man of commerce have produced a reaction upon the 
quality of the religious life of the churches at home and 
have forced upon them the task of reinterpreting their 
faith to themselves. A new consciousness of the inherent 
universality of the Christian faith and a new sense of 
the reality of the inner communion of all Christians are 
among the beneficent results. The doctrinal outcome 
will be referred to later. 

The increase of general intelligence in Protestant 
Christendom is equally noteworthy. The astounding 
educational advance of modern times is directly trace- 
able to religious impulses. The evangelist is followed 
by the teacher. The missionary becomes an educa- 
tionalist. The great systems of public schools, high 
schools, colleges, and universities, of which modern 
states are so justly proud, have mostly grown up from 
the voluntary schools founded by religious men and 
maintained by private funds in pursuance of the purpose 
to promote the spiritual good of the young. Although 
it may be true that in many cases the original founders 
of these schools were seeking particularly to guard the 
young believing mind from the assaults of a secularized 
intellect, nevertheless the evidence remains clear that 
with the modern Protestant the religious life cannot be 
truly fostered except by the increase of intelligence. 
Moreover, in addition to the schools of Christendom 
there is the tremendous educational influence of the 
press. The unlimited circulation of newspapers and 
periodicals of all kinds and the prodigious output of 



Evangelicism 151 

books, taken in conjunction with the free intermingling 
of millions of men by means of wide travel and the 
use of the telegraph and telephone, have produced a 
sense of the dignity and power of the human spirit and 
a consciousness of human solidarity scarcely dreamed 
of before. The religious life of such a people must be 
vastly different in its content and utterance from any 
earlier type. There is a modernized Protestant Chris- 
tianity. The modern evangel has obtained a wider range 
of appeal and an increase of power to impress its convic- 
tions on men. It has appropriated the language of 
modern culture and has gained a broader outlook. All 
the pursuits of intelligence are now reckoned within 
the pale of the religious life. Christians are conscious 
of a larger vocation. In order that this vocation may be 
fulfilled a reinterpretation of Christianity is demanded. 

2. SOME SECULAR FORCES CONTRIBUTING TO THE 
FORMATION OF A NEW TYPE OF CHRISTIANITY 

It is not to be supposed for a moment that the reli- 
gious life of our times takes its character wholly from 
those influences which are ordinarily acknowledged as 
religious; For the religious life of any people at any 
period of time is constituted by the whole complex of 
forces which, in their unity, go to make up the character 
of the people in question. Everything about them heads 
up in their religion. This is seen particularly in Prot- 
estant life. For Protestantism, by breaking away from 
the ideals of the cloister and sallying forth to the task of 
mastering and sanctifying the natural, exposed itself from 
the very first to the molding influence of industry and 
trade as well as to the currents of social and political life. 



152 What Is Christianity? 

It is surely a significant thing that the intensification 
and expansion of the religious life of Protestantism in 
the last century and a half is fairly paralleled by a similar 
growth in the production and exchange of material 
wealth. The spirit of enterprise inherent in Prot- 
estantism, which had suffered a check through the 
internal strifes of Europe, reawoke at the very time when 
"the Spirit of the Lord began to move mightily" upon 
John Wesley and George Whitefield. Beginning in the 
eighteenth century and continuing through the nine- 
teenth, there was an economic awakening like that which 
occurred when mediaeval Europe was roused from her 
intellectual sloth, her moral coarseness, and her religious 
passivity. Only, the new change was on a tremendous 
scale. Mechanical invention has produced a revolution 
in nearly all human industries. Production, manu- 
facture, and transportation proceed on a scale impossible 
to imagine one hundred and fifty years ago. The factory 
and not the home is now the seat of industry. The town 
has been robbing the country of its peasantry. New 
vast centers of population have been created. Cities 
number their inhabitants by the hundreds of thousands 
and by the millions. New sources of wealth have been 
sought out and forces long concealed from human ken 
have been recruited for man's service. Lands far 
separated geographically have realized a close commun- 
ity of interest. Railroads have made them neighbors. 
Great ships of high speed in ever-growing numbers plow 
the seas. The production of wealth has become fabulous, 
and its exchange is now so complicated that only the 
few understand its processes. Geographical boundaries 
and national distinctions have been mostly overcome 



Evangelicism 153 

for the purposes of trade. Steam, steel, and electricity 
have belted far^separated communities together as one 
vast industrial body. The problems of adjustment 
which in consequence confront the economist, the states- 
man, and the moralist are simply appalling. Not less 
serious are the problems which confront the religious 
thinker, as we shall see. 

Be it noted that the Protestant nations have been 
the leaders in these enterprises. Where Protestant reli- 
gion enters, there too comes material prosperity and 
comfort. It is surely a far cry from the natural poverty 
of the primitive Christian and his longing for the Lord's 
return, as well as from the voluntary poverty of the 
mediaeval saint and his longing for heaven, to the acquisi- 
tion of incalculable wealth by modern Protestant Chris- 
tians and their devotion of it to the enterprises of religious 
faith. There seems to be a natural association between 
Protestant religion and Protestant industry. The con- 
currence of the two revivals in time and space implies 
their dependence upon a common impulse. Surely some 
new sense of freedom, of initiative, of creative power, 
had come to men and was manifesting its character in 
the parallel conquests of things material and things 
spiritual. That it was so in the spiritual realm we have 
already seen. It was the same in the realm of physical 
industry, we must conclude, if we rely on the enunciation 
of its controlling principle by Adam Smith in his famous 
Wealth of Nations. He says: "The patrimony of a poor 
man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands, and 
to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity 
in what manner he thinks proper, without injury to his 
neighbor, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. 



154 What Is Christianity? 

It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of 
both the workman and of those who might be disposed 
to employ him." If we change the reference in these 
words from man's outer powers to his inner powers and 
the application from external acts to inward acts, we 
detect the inner harmony between Protestant industrial- 
ism and Protestant religion. We shall see, however, that 
neither is an instance of pure individualism. 

Far more significant than the mere creation and 
accumulation of wealth or the new distribution and 
grouping of population, with the accompanying social 
changes, is the manner (alluded to above) in which the 
activities and interests of all the peoples concerned have 
become interlocked. An economic disturbance in one 
quarter of the world is rapidly transmitted to almost 
every part of it. A feeling of economic interdependence 
pervades the world, overriding hostile tariffs and other 
artificial restrictions. Economic insularity is becoming a 
thing of the past. The industries of the world are more 
than competitive; they are complementary. There is 
an increasing sensitiveness with regard to business 
happenings everywhere. The time seems near when 
the many economic kingdoms of the world shall become 
one kingdom. 

Changes in the political realm during the period 
under review have been equally startling, and their 
bearing on the religious life of men is important. It has 
been a time of political revolution, partly peaceful and 
partly violent. In this the Anglo-Saxon and French 
peoples have been the leaders. The democratic self- 
affirmation that broke out in the American Revolution 
and culminated in the founding of the republic of the 



Evangelicism 155 

United States was just the revival and reinforcement of 
the ancient British contention that the people must be 
self-governing. It reawoke in the mother-country the 
conviction of the supreme worth of this principle and the 
determination to enforce it. The loss of a portion of 
the British Empire was followed by a wonderful exten- 
sion of it in other directions, and with this extension of 
political power went a gradual extension of democratic 
self-government to more than four hundred millions of 
people. The revolutionary spirit that wrought success- 
fully in America spread to France and roused that 
magnificent though long-suffering people to the con- 
sciousness of powers and rights that had smoldered for 
generations. With the watchwords "Liberty, equality, 
fraternity" upon their lips the French people pressed on 
toward the fondly cherished task of bringing all nations 
to share in their own newly discovered destiny. The 
outcome was seen in the turmoils that came to a climax 
in the Napoleonic wars. Though a powerful reaction 
followed, it was not permanent except in a few quarters. 
The nineteenth century was pre-eminently revolutionary 
in politics. There were repeated revolutions in France, 
culminating in the firm establishment of the Republic. 
Spanish and Portuguese colonies revolted and succeeded 
in forming independent governments, mostly republican. 
Revolution in the Italian peninsula issued in a truly 
national government. A peaceable revolution was 
accomplished in Britain by the passing of electoral 
reform bills, emancipation acts, and the repeal of the 
Corn Laws. Minor revolutions occurred elsewhere. 
Attempted revolutions in Spain, Poland, Prussia, and 
Russia mostly failed because of the want of deep popular 



156 What Is Christianity ? 

conviction or because of the supremacy of the military 
power. Almost with the turn of the twentieth century 
the ancient Manchu dynasty was overthrown and a 
republic was formed in China. At the very moment of 
my writing there comes over the wires and through the 
air the news of an internal struggle in mighty Russia 
that may pave the way for democracy. Similar changes 
elsewhere seem impending. 

A profound spiritual significance in these changes 
is further suggested by the intimacy of their connection 
with the achievements of scientific investigation. Were 
one to confine his attention to the progress of " natural 
science" alone, the result would be sufficiently impressive. 
The man of science, armed with a splendid technique, 
has been reconquering old realms and conquering realms 
hitherto unknown. Scientific research has been prolific 
not only in discovery but also in the creation of new 
problems for the thinker. Consider a single pertinent 
fact in this connection — the dependence of modern indus- 
trialism and modern civil government upon the labors of 
science. Agriculture, manufacture, building, and trans- 
portation look for guidance to the scientific laboratory 
where, unseen by the great world around him, the 
explorer of nature's secrets makes his discoveries of the 
dark continents of reality which others are to exploit 
for human good. In that same quiet chamber also are 
being forged implements of government by which the 
citizens of a nation are enabled to live and move 
together and the different nations to work out their 
fearful problems in alliance or opposition. In the 
present war the issues are as much determined by the 
man who holds the weapons of scientific experiment as 



Evangelicism 157 

by the soldier who wields the weapons which these other 
weapons have made. 

When the religious thinker contemplates these recent 
developments, he is likely to be impressed with the 
following : 

In the first place, these different tides of influence 
have been synchronous, concurrent, and operative upon 
the life of about the same peoples. The awakening of 
the religious consciousness, the commitment to new 
religious and ecclesiastical enterprise, the uprising of the 
Christian intelligence, the growing mastery of the secrets 
of nature and the control and utilization of her forces 
for man's purposes, the progress of democratic revolution 
in political and civil life, the weaving of the web of 
international relations from which no civilized nation 
can extricate itself — these constitute a great mass move- 
ment that seems to operate in obedience to a new con- 
sciousness of the meaning of human life and to a new 
interpretation of its destiny. 

In the second place, there is manifest in all this the 
power of individual personal initiative. Conventional 
beliefs, social customs, industrial methods, political 
establishments, have all been challenged by daring 
reformers and innovators. The experimenter, the specu- 
lator, the discoverer, the inventor, and the creator have 
done new things, and the world has been following, some- 
times "afar off," and trying to appropriate the results. 
No matter how fast society seeks to institutionalize and 
force the individual's activity into regular grooves, he 
breaks away and pushes on still faster. He cannot 
perish. There never was such another age of individual- 
ism as the present. 



158 What Is Christianity? 

In the third place, by this very development of the 
free individual personality the true universality of man 
has come to light. The breaking of the old bonds of 
union among men has led the way to a higher unity. 
This is attained by the normal unfolding of his powers in 
their unity and not by the method of artificial restraint. 
The consciousness of the essential inner unity of all man- 
kind, of the facts and forces of nature, and of man and 
nature — even though the character of this latter unity 
may be indefinable as yet — is gradually forcing itself upon 
the human spirit. Thus by the common progress of men 
under a guidance, higher, let us believe, than the human, 
a fundamental principle of the Reformation is finding 
recognition: namely, life is a unit, the separation of the 
secular activity of man from the holy is being annulled, 
heaven and earth are coming together, the world in which 
we live is our Father's house of "many mansions.' ' 

If, therefore, all these various regions of human 
experience belong to one another and if in their unity 
they constitute the proper sphere of religion; then, if the 
Christian faith is to permeate them all with its spirit, if 
it is destined to become the universal faith, this must 
be because it reveals the ultimate meaning of them all. 
A new attempt at an interpretation of its meaning 
becomes indispensable to the believer. 

3. THE INFLUENCE OF RECENT ATTEMPTS TO 
UNDERSTAND CHRISTIANITY 

Of late the Christian spirit has been diligently work- 
ing upon a new interpretation of itself. If the positions 
assumed in the foregoing statements be tenable, then 
the imperativeness of restating the Christian faith can 



Evangelicism 159 

be escaped only by him who abandons its hope of uni- 
versal dominion. For, indeed, it is in obedience to the 
high demands of the faith itself that men have been 
exploring and mapping out afresh the territory it has 
covered in its course. 

A reinterpretation of the faith has been sought 
through a historical recapitulation of its progress in 
time and space. The birth of the historical spirit came 
late in Christian circles. Until quite recently the his- 
tory of Christianity was studied mainly for apologetical 
or polemical purposes. Catholics supported the claims 
of their church by referring to an unbroken historical 
succession. Protestants sought to prove that Catholi- 
cism was a pagan corruption of the true faith by com- 
paring it with the early Christianity. Later on, the 
Deists sought to establish a similar charge against 
orthodox Protestantism. Orthodox apologists like Lard- 
ner replied with evidence corroborative of the historicity 
of biblical accounts. The work of the historical criticism 
of biblical documents was soon under way. At last a 
direct interest in the history of Christianity was aroused. 
It shared in the spirit of scientific exploration referred 
to above. The Christian historian came under the sway 
of the scientific conscience for facts. The apologetical 
and polemical interest began to give place to the love 
of truth. By unmeasured diligence and patience the 
long story has been gradually unfolded. The perspec- 
tive of nineteen centuries and the broad horizon of 
present world-knowledge have combined to produce 
certain overwhelming convictions. 

To begin with, the Christian religion, whatever be 
its source or its ultimate explanation, is a distinctive 



160 What Is Christianity ? 

spiritual force in the world of men, increasing in momen- 
tum from age to age, permeating more and more the 
self-conscious life, the social relations, the political insti- 
tutions, and the industrial enterprises of the people who 
come under its influence. It seems destined to dominate 
the world. In the successive stages of its career it has 
produced or assumed many forms of expression — dis- 
courses, prophecies, hymns, churches, schools, types of 
architecture, forms of ritual or liturgy, and bodies of 
doctrine. Each one of these seemed at some time essen- 
tial to it, but they have all been under constant process 
of change. They pass, but it survives. It is greater 
than any or all of its creations — greater than the Bible, 
the churches, and the creeds. Its value lies in itself 
and not in something that is a means to its progress. 
Its truth lies in its own inherent power and not in its 
conformity to some standard outside of it. Not less 
wonderful than its many changing forms is the constancy 
of its character. For, notwithstanding the disharmonies 
and perversions that have arisen in its course, it has 
ever tended to turn the minds of men trustfully to an 
Unseen from whom they came and to whom they go, a 
heavenly Father; it has spurred them on hopefully to 
a personal ideal that ever beckons them on to the better 
life and, though itself always in advance of them, is 
very real to them because it fulfils itself daily in them; 
it has inspired them with undying courage and strength 
because it has made them conscious of a Power dwelling 
in their hearts and ever filling their lives with greater 
worth. It has therefore thrown itself freely into the 
great enterprises of men and has stimulated them con- 
stantly to new enterprise. It has thereby pushed the 
race on to higher achievement. 



Evangelicism 161 

In all this it has borne a distinctive character. It 
has made men aware that the greatest thing about them 
is their inner life — in this lies the clue to all that is worth- 
ful, the bond that unites men to one another and that 
brings them to fellowship with God. It has always 
purified that life, removing the selfishness, the cowardice, 
the malice, and the lust. It is communion-forming. 
It has united men in mutual love and esteem, it has 
purified their intercourse from immorality, it has bound 
their wills together in the pursuit of ends which could 
never be attained without this pure love. It has filled 
them with the determination to unite all men finally in 
a common holy destiny, and teaches them never to give 
one another up, never to despair of men. None can be 
spared. Hence the labors expended so freely in behalf 
of the ignorant and the fallen. Its course is marked by 
works of mercy. 

The historical view of Christianity has had a liberat- 
ing and elevating influence on those who have partici- 
pated in it. While it inculcates reverence for churches 
and creeds as forms in which the Christian spirit clothes 
itself, it teaches men to regard all these as only tempo- 
rary. They are helps for a time but not authorities, 
good servants but bad masters. By looking backward 
men learn that their ideal is before, and not behind, 
them. Historical study has helped to create what I 
have here called evangelicism, the gospel of history, the 
message of the ultimate attainment of the Christian 
good. 

Or, in the next place, we may turn to the recent 
study of the character and career of Jesus Christ. This 
is a special instance, in part, of the influence of historical 
study, but on account of its cardinal relation to our faith 



1 62 What Is Christianity? 

it is deserving of a separate consideration. It is not 
very long since the cry, "Back to Christ," began to be 
heard in Protestant circles after a long silence. It arose 
partly out of the feeling that traditional Christianity had 
wandered far from the spirit of its founder, and out of 
the desire to recover its original purity and simplicity. 
The motive was practical rather than theoretical — the 
desire to live the true Christian life rather than the wish 
to construct a new Christian dogma. The hope was 
to find in the story of Jesus and in the record of his 
teachings the needed guidance and strength for the 
moral and religious life. Ecclesiastical strifes, doc- 
trinal differences, metaphysical problems, were to be 
left aside and the character of his personality recovered. 
Men were to have a direct view of his way of life, his 
aims and hopes and ambitions, his estimate of men and 
his treatment of them, his outlook upon the world, 
and his heart-relation to God. They were even to live 
through his inner experiences. The motive was pure. 

The outcome is rich in every way, but also surprising. 
For the religious purpose has been strengthened by the 
same scientific interest that operated so powerfully in 
the historical study of the Christian religion. The task 
has proved unexpectedly difficult. The labor expended 
has been prodigious, and the spirit and method of the 
study, on the whole, worthy of the subject. It became 
evident soon that there was much more to do than to 
construct a new "harmony of the Gospels," or to arrange 
Jesus' teachings in an orderly manner. The world of 
men and things in which he lived, the concrete circum- 
stances that called forth his deeds and words, the tradi- 
tions and other influences from the distant past that 



Evangelicism 163 

entered into his soul, had to be restored. Above all, 
the student could not solve his problem without seeking 
to reproduce in his own soul the very heart-life of Jesus. 
Even this was insufficient. For it was as truly impos- 
sible to know him apart from the impressions he made 
on other people as it is impossible to estimate the char- 
acter of any other man apart from the reflection of it 
in those who came under his influence. Indeed, we 
have no representation of his words and deeds that was 
given independently of the manner in which others felt 
about him. 

We are here concerned particularly with the results 
for the Christian life. What are the most important of 
them ? Summarily, first of all is the assurance that a 
human life possessed of the beauty and the strength, the 
meekness and the majesty, the tenderness and the stern- 
ness, the patience and determination, and all the other 
qualities that stand out in the picture of the evangelists 
was really lived in such a world and at such a time as 
that. The unspeakable comfort is ours that such a 
life can be lived, it is thoroughly human, it may be ours. 
An immense inspiration comes to make that life our own 
and to live it by faith in the same God. Then, too, we 
see that this life of his in its inner qualities is transmis- 
sible and has really been transmitted to others. It has 
flowed out into human life at large. It has become a 
permanent asset of the race. The more men familiarize 
themselves with the image of his personality reflected 
in the narratives and in the religious life that has been 
propagated from him as its source the more his name 
comes to stand for the whole content of what is good for 
men and for the whole aim of their being. He has 



164 What Is Christianity? 

become the great companion of men. They feel that he 
is living with them all the time. His spirit goes out 
conquering and to conquer. This is the faith he has 
produced in them, and this is his great achievement. 
Him, therefore, they follow. With him they live, with 
him they die, and with him they reign. This may not 
be formal logic, but it is faith, and he has given it to them 
as their inalienable possession. The emancipating out- 
come of the study has also been very great. Men who 
cannot understand the creeds, who feel that the profound 
metaphysical subtleties that have been draped about him 
are beyond their power to comprehend, and who have 
believed that their faith can be only second hand and 
dependent on authority have laid hold once more on the 
confidence that he is the friend of those who labor and 
are heavy laden and the meek and lowly may learn of 
him. A divine personality has triumphed once more 
over institutions and theories. 

A third line of reflection that has powerfully con- 
tributed to the modernized Protestant Christianity is 
traceable in the renewed study of the inner life of the 
Christian soul. Until recently the subjective side of the 
Christian religion was scarcely regarded as affording 
the true basis for an understanding of its nature. The 
warmth of religious feeling in men has always tended to 
express itself with great freedom and confidence. Piety 
has often reveled in the joy and power of a new life in the 
soul. Mystics in all ages, like the born psychologists 
they are, have sought to trace in an orderly manner the 
working of the divine Spirit upon their own spirit in the 
hope of communicating, if possible, the great secret to 
others. But the very subjectivity of their represen- 



Evangelicism 165 

tations, the extraordinary character of them, the com- 
mon opinion that these men were the favored few — 
"saints" to whom were vouchsafed experiences denied 
to the common people — confirmed the tendency to repose 
the truth of Christianity on the external authority of 
miraculous events, or of the church, or of the Scriptures, 
or of the creeds, or of sacraments. The subjective ex- 
perience of the Christian was conceived to be the result 
of receiving the objective realities. 

But when the great revival referred to in the fore- 
going pages led to a reaffirmation of the worth of the 
religious experience, the way was opened to the work of 
reinterpreting the meaning of the Christian faith on the 
basis of that very subjective experience which had been 
so often disparaged. The great Schleiermacher led the 
way. The movement has grown to vast proportions. 
The psychology of the Christian religion has become a 
regular discipline in theological studies. Passing by the 
scientific product, the outcome for the Christian faith 
has been impressive. 

For one thing, it has led Christians to perceive that 
their greatest possession is just the faith itself that has 
arisen in the soul. It is the man's inalienable wealth, 
and its power is inextinguishable. Even the inability 
to trace its source or to justify it intellectually is not 
fatal to it. It moves on in the soul and seems to have 
a logic of its own. Moreover, we have found that the 
experience is not merely subjective or purely individual- 
istic. Its power of self-communication to others and 
its unifying power in communities of men are as impres- 
sive as its inner personal force. Then, too, it is dis- 
covered that religion of some kind is universal. Men 



1 66 What Is Christianity? 

are not men without it. The way of approach to the 
votaries of other faiths is open. The Christian religion 
has points of contact with all other religions, and if it 
is destined to displace them, as we believe, that is because 
all that is truly worthful in them finds fulfilment in the 
Christian faith. This view carries with it everywhere a 
profound respect for religion. For the study of religions 
tends to confirm the Christian's confidence that his 
religious faith is that which more than anything else 
constitutes the character and the excellency of man's 
nature. The story of man becomes the history of his 
religion, or, putting it in another way, the religious faith 
of man is the wellspring of all his activities. 

4. A CHARACTERIZATION OF EVANGELICISM 

The quality of the modernized Protestantism which 
I have chosen to designate by this name can be easily 
anticipated from the foregoing description of the influ- 
ences which have combined to produce it. 

First of all, there is the point of its religious emphasis : 
The worth of personality is supreme. In every being 
that has the capacity to know that "this is I," whether 
it be the child whose self-consciousness is only inchoate 
or the perfect man whose soul is aware of its dignity 
in such a masterly manner that it proposes to subjugate 
a world to its authority; whether it be the crude and 
coarse savage barely able to defeat the animal within 
or without him in the battle of life, or the man whose 
soul is clean and tender and aware of its kinship with the 
Unseen, there is in every personality a sanctuary that 
may not be profaned by the foot of another without 
coming under a curse, a citadel from which he may repel 



Evangelicism 167 

all invaders because in his inmost being he is united with 
the Father of all. Hence exist the reverence for child- 
hood and the respect for its rights, the sacredness of 
human life and the effort to make the most of its potencies 
in all, the horror at the sight of cruelty and wanton 
slaughter of men, and the leaping of millions of men to 
arms to guard the community of men from danger. 
This is modern religion. 

Thereby the tasks of life take on a new meaning. 
None of them is worthless and none of them is tried in 
vain. Whether it be the lowly toil of him who handles 
the pick and shovel, or the delicate and recondite search 
of the highly trained physicist, or the appalling issues 
confronting the statesman and the soldier, makes no 
difference. These tasks are religious. In the midst 
of them, and not by separation from them, will the man 
find his salvation. All men are equally called by the 
Most High, and all are to be estimated in terms of his 
worth. 

The very material universe loses its hostile or indiffer- 
ent character and becomes the sphere in which self- 
conscious personality may find fulfilment of its powers. 
The universe is friendly and will not crush us. From it 
there come to us constantly messages of hope and inspira- 
tion. There is an infinite Good Will at the heart of 
things and nothing shall by any means hurt us. For 
in it and through it there is a personality that answers 
to us when we cry, a Spirit in whom our spirit becomes 
aware of its destiny, a God whose fatherly purpose is 
revealed to us, his children. He will never leave us. 
Neither life nor death is a barrier to his fellowship 
with us. His very judgments draw us to him in lowly, 



1 68 What Is Christianity? 

loving assurance of safety. For his purpose toward men 
is not double but single, and he will not be discouraged 
in its pursuit. If the God of the early Protestant was 
conceived mostly as the Judge-Ruler, the God of the 
modernized Protestant is mainly the Father-Ruler. 

Not less striking is the religious estimate of Jesus 
Christ. He is more than a remote figure for whose 
physical return men long and wait in vain, more than a 
mysterious union of two incommensurable natures to be 
reverenced in a mystery, more than the sorrowful sufferer 
who has renounced all earthly goods, more than the penal 
sufferer who awakens our gratitude by his death but 
reserves his high prerogative to himself. He is that 
perfect personality who has sown himself into the life 
of our humanity in such a way that he can never be 
separated from the weakest or the worst of us, the great 
companion who carries us gladly into the very secret 
of his vicariousness and imparts it to us as our high 
privilege. No solitary grandeur is his. The prayer is 
never in vain: 

O Master, let me walk with thee 
In lowly paths of service free; 
Tell me thy secret. 

In the answer to this prayer the modern man finds his 
salvation. 

In the next place, the moral ideal is correspondingly 
elevated. In place of the attainment of an abstract 
righteousness or freedom from judicial guilt and the 
passive peace that was formerly supposed to issue from it 
there is the overmastering desire to attain to the life of 
ministry to men as the highest privilege of life. Personal 
worth is to be secured by unstinted self-giving to 



Evangelicism 169 

others. The true renunciation is made by achievement. 
The true heaven of rest is found in perfect action. 
The truly unselfish life is found, not in retirement 
from the world, but in the free commitment of one's self 
to the work of making the material and spiritual forces of 
the universe instrumental to the purposes of personality 
and to the work of permeating the affairs of men in all 
the realms of action with a sense of the infinite worth of 
every person, so that men may be bound together in a 
communion of good-will. The man who smites with 
terrible blows the forces that rise in opposition to this 
ideal and who upholds with might the forces working 
in its favor is the true modern saint. 

The whole man is involved in the pursuit of the ideal. 
Physical well-being and intellectual vigor have moral 
value. The material goods which serve the purpose of 
realizing the spiritual ideal are to be cherished and not 
despised. Intellectual pursuits are not a luxury, but a 
necessity of the moral career. The whole man in his 
unity must be saved, and that not by submission to a 
mysterious force from without, but by means of his own 
hearty self-commitment to his task. This concentrated 
activity is not in order to rest, but in order to the attain- 
ment of more perfect action. 

As the whole man is sanctified, so the whole of the 
natural order of society is sanctified. Institutions, such 
as the family, the school, the business corporation, the 
state, are no longer purely secular, but take on the same 
holy character which has been ascribed to the church. 
They are modes of the progressive realization of that 
supreme moral ideal for which Jesus Christ gave himself 
— the Kingdom of God. 



170 What Is Christianity ? 

In the third place, there is an institutional interest 
in evangelicism. The interest of institutions lies in their 
instrumental value. Institutions of all kinds are to be 
tested by serviceability to human needs. Churches and 
their priests or* ministers, their forms of organization 
and their liturgies, their sacred writings and their creeds, 
fall under the same rule as schools with their educational 
methods, civil states with their laws, and industrial 
orders with their processes of production and exchange — 
namely, the imperious demand that they minister to the 
creation of a community life in which the Christian ideal 
of perfect personality may find fulfilment. Without 
this, no matter how hoary their traditions or lofty their 
claims, they are nehushtan. Sanctity lies not in insti- 
tutions or offices, but in the character of the man 
whose higher life they serve. These things do not come 
to us with authority from without, but they are created 
from within the man and have their authority there. 
Evangelicism is institutionally free. And thus, with 
its broad and deep interpretation of the relation of the 
Christian religion to the forms in which the spirit of the 
man has clothed itself in the past or may clothe itself 
in the future, it prepares us for the realization of the 
longed-for unity of all Christians and at last of all men. 

Finally, there is the theological trend. The theology 
of evangelicism is yet to be written, for the most part. 
It would be impossible within our available space to 
indicate even in barest outline the contents of this 
theology. Only a word or two may be said about its 
general character. To begin with, the theological 
interest will be deep because theology is a part of that 
same spiritual life in men which is active in faith. As 



Evangelicism 171 

this faith grows theology must advance. Then, too, the 
theology of evangelicism will be sensitive to all those 
other world-forces which we have enumerated as uniting 
to produce it, and it will attempt to give a religious 
explanation of them all. Moreover, it will have a 
distinctly practical aim. It will strive consciously to 
give to the believer the guidance he needs in performing 
his duty in the midst of those currents of power by which 
he finds himself surrounded. It will be the theology, 
not of the monk, but of the man of affairs. For this 
reason it will be free from bondage to all or any past 
forms of doctrine or to its own forms of doctrine, because 
all doctrine is ultimately dependent for its value on the 
faith it seeks to expound, and as faith grows doctrine 
must develop also. At the same time it will have a 
profound respect for the theology of the past because 
that theology was the expression of the religious faith 
of those times from which our own faith has been derived. 
Most of all, it will seek to be true to the Christian spirit 
by keeping in sympathy with the purpose of Jesus Christ 
and the purpose of God revealed in him, for therein it 
finds its inspiration and its support. The particular 
manner in which it will go to work to reconstruct the 
expression of the eternal realities of the Christian faith 
must be left for discussion in a future work. 



CHAPTER VII 
WHAT, THEN, IS CHRISTIANITY? 

The reader who has followed sympathetically the 
foregoing exposition of the various systems purporting 
to be the true interpretation of the Christian religion 
may now be prepared to share the impressive and com- 
forting experience of the writer as he has sought to under- 
stand the great forces that have operated in the making 
of Christian history. It is fitting that we should now 
attempt to set forth some of the convictions which have 
arisen in this connection. It may be that the statements 
to be made will seem but commonplaces, but even so, they 
take on added force by reason of our survey of historic 
views and our attempt to enter as fully as possible into 
the soul of each of them. For we may rest assured that 
none of these types of Christian thought could possibly 
have won the devoted allegiance of the numberless 
multitudes that followed them had they not contained 
elements of great spiritual power in all instances. 

Our answer to the question that lies at the head of 
this chapter will not take the form of an attempted 
definition of Christianity in a single formula, nor will 
it be just one more attempt to reduce our religion to its 
ultimate and irreducible essence. It will aim, rather, 
at comprehensiveness and at suggesting lines of further 
development of the successive theses here to be offered. 
At the same time we shall proceed on the whole from 
the more general to the more specific. 

172 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 173 

1. To begin with, the Christian religion coincides in 
some degree with all these historic interpretations; 
it includes them all and yet at the same time it cannot 
be fully identified now with any one of them or with 
all of them united. Let us suppose for a moment that 
by some great cataclysm all those forms in which the 
Christian religion has been outwardly set forth in the 
past — the spontaneous words and acts of devotion, 
the creeds of the thinkers, the liturgies of public worship, 
the regular customs, the moral codes, the types of organi- 
zation, and the methods of work popularly accepted — 
were suddenly to pass away today. What then ? The 
Christian religion would be with us none the less tomor- 
row. There might be some confusion and perplexity 
for a time, but that great power which we are habituated 
to call the Spirit of Christ would remain in men's hearts 
and would soon begin to adjust itself to the new con- 
ditions and demands that must arise. Christianity is 
nothing if it be not ceaselessly creative of the new. 
Hence, under the circumstances, it would surely begin 
at once to forge for itself new forms for utterance, as 
surely as active children will discover new ways for 
playing with one another if there be no person to teach 
them the old. It would clothe its life in these forms and 
through them it would be effectively propagated in the 
world again. These new forms would probably resemble 
some of those that had passed away, but they would be 
very different because the people using them would be 
very different from the Christians of the past in respect 
both to inward life and to outer conditions. For, as a 
matter of fact, most of our conventional religious forms 
have come down to us from a time when they meant 



174 What Is Christianity ? 

something very different to those who used them from 
what they mean to us who use them now. They can 
be prevented from having a benumbing effect on our 
souls only by continual reinterpretations of them, and 
these reinterpretations would be very confusing to the 
first users of these forms if they were brought suddenly 
face to face with them. 

Then, too, the forms that would arise in one part of 
the world and in one grade of society would differ from 
those that would arise in another part of the world and 
another grade of society. If these different peoples 
began to mingle, there would be a repetition of some 
familiar past experiences. Conferences, controversies, 
amalgamations, reconciliations, divisions, and excom- 
munications would take place, and yet none of them 
would take the same course as was taken under similar 
circumstances in the past. Perhaps all of the many 
sects among which Christians are now divided would 
be lost sight of, but new sects would inevitably arise. 
Of course no such thing will ever happen suddenly — 
though it is happening all the time, but gradually — and 
were it to occur we should be both worse off and better 
off than we are now. It would be a deliverance from 
slavery to the past. Old theological and ecclesiastical 
quarrels with their intolerances would be heard no more. 
Our worship, as well as our creed, would have about it a 
sincerity and a naturalness most refreshing to anyone 
who is aware of the purely artificial character of much 
of our formal worship and of our formal reasonings. 
For example, there would be no bowings before the 
image of a virgin and there would be no arguments about 
miracles. We should save a great deal of time that is 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 175 

now wasted and a great deal of bitterness would be lost. 
For a while, at least, we should experience the joyous 
elasticity of a truly religious life and our faith would be 
spread abroad with something of the ardor and speed 
of its earliest achievements. The spirit of inquiry would 
be freed from the benumbing influence of ecclesiastical 
office, always jealous of its authority, and would make 
surer progress. Many stumbling-blocks in the way of 
would-be believers would disappear. What burdens 
would be lifted from our souls! 

But at the same time it must be confessed that we 
should be worse off than we are now in some respects 
if all traditional forms of the regular interpretation of 
our faith were suddenly taken away. Some kind of 
external expression is necessary to all religion if men 
are to hold it firmly or share it with their fellow-men. 
A faith destitute of all recognizable outer form would 
probably perish with the death of the man whose faith 
it was. A recluse might hold it, but it would not become 
naturalized in the world of men. It would lack historical 
continuity and would suffer abuse through the whims 
and vagaries of individuals. If we dropped all tradi- 
tional religious forms we should need new forms, and 
these would be of uncertain meaning and value to other 
people because of never having been subjected to the 
tests which time applies to everything we do. It is 
certain that there would be much wavering and uncer- 
tainty as to what we meant until long experience had 
given some settled mode of expression to our inner life. 
We might enjoy the freshness and spontaneity and free- 
dom of a new faith, but we should be subjected to its 
temptations and dangers. If we are to believe the 



176 What Is Christianity ? 

historians, the primitive Christian faith that shook off 
so many burdens of the past was, relative to the extent 
of territory and number of people affected, as much 
troubled by uncertainty and confusion as to its real 
meaning as is the Christian faith of this restless and 
confusing time. How long it took those early Christians 
to find a thought-world and an action-world in which 
they as believers could find themselves at home! The 
radical who tosses overboard with impatience all the 
inherited forms by which Christianity has been helped 
or hindered makes a bad sailor and may soon be ship- 
wrecked. 

We can see, therefore, that past interpretations of 
Christianity are of great service to us, though they do 
often impose unnatural burdens on us, though they 
restrain our freedom of spirit, and though they cannot 
become ours fully, but must be changed. The liturgies, 
the moral regulations, the ecclesiastical organizations, 
and the creeds of the past have a steadying and pre- 
servative value. Were it not for them we may well 
doubt that Christianity as a persistent and definite 
force in the lives of men would be with us today. Our 
duty, therefore, is not to cast them rudely away, but to 
use them as stepping-stones to an interpretation more 
natural to us and more adequate to our needs. They 
are guides and also points of departure for something 
better. We shall exercise our right to set them aside 
as we gradually grow out of and away from them, just 
as people gradually change their habits of dress and 
social customs as one generation gives place to another. 
The birch tree clothes itself with new bark continually 
from within and lives on healthily when the old falls 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 177 

away. We shall reverently and carefully push our in- 
herited religious forms to the periphery of our actual 
world and clothe our minds and our lives with something 
that lies nearer to our hearts. For our forms of worship, 
doctrine, order, and conduct are not truly our religion. 
They are the outer of which our real religion is the inner. 

2. By this means we obtain a method of dealing with 
claims that certain historic forms are necessary to per- 
sonal salvation, or, to say the same thing from the Chris- 
tian point of view, that without them we cannot be 
Christian. For the sake of convenience we may divide 
these historic forms into four classes — liturgical, eccle- 
siastical, social, and doctrinal. These relate respectively 
to the spirit of worship, the spirit of evangelism, the 
spirit of action, and the spirit of truth, all of which are 
found in Christianity. We may assert that all these 
are essential to the Christian religion and the salvation 
that it brings. That is to say, a man cannot be Chris- 
tian unless he worship truly the Christian God, seek to 
communicate the Christian life to others, practice the 
Christian morality, and hold the Christian truth. 

But while these claims are almost universally allowed 
among Christians they have only a vague meaning to 
most people. Something more concrete, more specific, 
is wanted when people ask for the true marks of the 
Christian. Some recognizable act of worship or rever- 
ence, some visible order, some definite prohibition or 
command to be obeyed, some formal confession of belief, 
or all of these put together, are made the prerequisite 
to bearing the Christian name. As a matter of fact, 
Christians the world over have always required con- 
formity to one or more of these standards before they 



178 What Is Christianity ? 

will admit anyone to the rank of Christian. How far 
is this justifiable ? Are such standards admissible ? 

d) Let us begin with liturgies. Evidently the primi- 
tive Christians after a time made but little use of them. 
It is doubtless true that the early Jewish believers in 
the messiahship of Jesus adhered in a general way to 
the practice of observing the Jewish times for prayer, 
followed the conventional postures in public worship; 
and used the traditional formulas for the utterance of 
religious emotion. It may be that for a time they were 
particularly zealous in the worship of God in the way 
of the Fathers. But the breach with the Jews who dis- 
believed in the messiahship of Jesus tended to cause 
these things to fall away. On the other hand, both the 
Jewish and the Greek religious custom of baptizing the 
catechumens in water and of uniting in a sacred feast 
to their deities gave strength to the Christian practice 
of baptizing believers with the pronunciation of the 
name of Jesus over them and their feast in memory of 
Jesus. For these acts set forth with vividness their 
sense of union with him in his life's purpose and his 
death and sealed their confidence in a fuller union to 
come. Would any man be accepted as a Christian 
who refused to participate in these acts? We can 
answer unhesitatingly, No. For such refusal would be 
tantamount to disowning the specific marks of the 
Christian. Such a man would be regarded as separating 
himself from Christ, and inasmuch as the deliverance 
which Christ would bring when he came again would 
be only for those who bore his name, the man would 
be rejected at the last day. It is just what we should 
expect, therefore, if we find these liturgical acts presently 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 179 

viewed by Christians everywhere as necessary to salva- 
tion for everyone. 

Out of this grew the entire sacramental system of 
the Catholic church. With both priests and people the 
sacraments became the divinely prescribed means of 
receiving the saving grace of God. When the radical 
reformers of Protestantism fought against this substitu- 
tion of an outer act for an inward state, some of them 
went so far as to repudiate the idea that any definite 
outward act had a necessary or even a natural place in 
the Christian religion. Others sought to restore the 
primitive practice without attributing any necessary 
relation between these forms and the procurement of 
salvation. Yet, while theoretically the necessity has 
been increasingly denied, it has been found practically 
necessary, if the Christian community is to live on in 
the world — and that means if the Christian gospel is to 
save the world — that these early liturgical forms be 
continued. The churches that have eschewed them 
have not been markedly successful in evangelism. Are 
liturgical forms essential, then, for each man, if he would 
be saved ? An enlightened modern Christianity answers, 
Certainly not, for that would be heathenism. Multi- 
tudes of true Christians pay little or no attention to them 
without perceivable spiritual loss. Protestant pulpits 
make but scanty mention of them in these days. On 
the other hand, it would seem that some form of liturgy 
is necessary to the propagation and sustenance of the 
Christian faith. For without some outer form of expres- 
sion that has become familiar by use and significant 
of the Christian faith the Christian spirit would be 
lacking many of its most effective modes of utterance 



180 What Is Christianity? 

and would measurably fail to catch the imagination or 
stir the fervor of multitudes. From the practical point 
of view, therefore, some kind of liturgy is necessary, but 
there is no form that is permanently necessary. A 
liturgy of some sort, be it simple or elaborate, is indis- 
pensable, but a fixed or statutory liturgy, whether simple 
or complex, is a detriment to the Christian spirit and 
may eventuate in heathenism. 

b) If we consider the ecclesiastical forms that have 
arisen as regularly established modes of Christian activ- 
ity or as the outcome of efforts to institutionalize the 
Christian faith, a similar conclusion is reached. Early 
Christians constituted a fellowship. They met regu- 
larly in assembly. They recognized one another as 
members of a common order or body. They were 
organized for mutual encouragement and protection 
and for the purpose of spreading the faith. They chose 
leaders and submitted to regular guidance. All this 
was natural, inevitable, and necessary if they were to 
enjoy a continuous existence as a people. Without this 
continuance their gospel would fail of perpetuation and 
amid the many theories claiming divine origin believers 
would fall into confusion and disappear by dispersion. 
So, then, it was perfectly natural that membership in 
the Christian community should be made a condition 
of sharing in the benefits of the new spiritual com- 
munion. It only required time and favorable circum- 
stances to bring about the well-known transition from 
this natural point of view to the view that member- 
ship in an established external order was necessary 
in order to participation in the salvation of the last 
great day. 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 181 

In all ages there have been Christians who held them- 
selves aloof from allegiance to any institutionalized form 
of Christianity whatsoever and without apparent loss — 
but perhaps real gain — to their souls. Yet in the end 
most people will fail to hold steadfastly to their faith 
without some such support. Some form of church has 
been found practically necessary to the maintenance of 
the Christian faith — that is, to the salvation of the world. 
But this is a very different thing from saying that any 
fixed form of church organization or order is necessary. 
Fixity in this realm is as dangerous as fixity of ritual. 
The outcome must be some kind of hierarchical despot- 
ism. All the great church systems furnish illustrations 
of it. 

c) When we come to forms of conduct this mode of 
reasoning may seem questionable. Yet the principle 
is not different. For there is nothing more common in 
the world than "the form of godliness without the 
power.' ' True morality is in the inner quality of soul. 
" Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom 
of heaven." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
shall see God." Yet it is quite possible, and alas! a by 
no means infrequent occurrence, that the feeling of 
humility and the sense of purity may cloak the most 
heartless arrogance and the most selfish indulgence. The 
external conduct must be there, or there is no morality — 
so say men the world over, and they say it truly. 

On the other hand, when one asks, What in particular 
are the forms of conduct essential to the Christian life ? 
it is startling to find how many of the forms of one day 
would become detrimental to a true morality if main- 
tained as essential for a later day. What are the moral 



182 What Is Christianity? 

deeds a man must do if he is to be truly Christian ? The 
day must declare it. Let us take one or two instances 
of a simple kind and very pertinent to our discussion. 
It was said to them of old time: "If a man shall smite 
thee on the one cheek, turn to him the other also." 
Such a mode of action was essential to the successful 
living of the Christian life at a time when their faith was 
under the ban of public scorn or legal prohibition. Men 
won their way and preserved the Christian salvation 
for future generations by bearing violence without 
attempting to bring their assailants to judgment. Only 
by so enduring could the higher type of life gain recog- 
nition in the community. To fail at this point would 
be to renounce Christ. But when a time comes when 
violence offered to a man on account of his faith is 
recognized as unjust, and when the Christian allows 
his assailant at all times to go unscathed in reputation 
and unpunished in body, he may be doing the com- 
munity, the assailant, and himself a great wrong. It 
is well that all men be allowed to live their lives decently 
without disturbance, and it may cost much less sacrifice 
or suffering to one's self to let a miscreant go scot free 
than to bring him to justice and to his senses and thereby 
to protect decent people against his cruelty. The same 
line of remark is pertinent to the saying, "My kingdom 
is not of this world, else would my servants fight." 
When Christians are placed by their fellow-men in posi- 
tions of great responsibility in the government of their 
country, the rule of conduct suited to a time when their 
most effective means of promoting peace was by throw- 
ing aside all the weapons of war must give way to a truer 
embodiment, for a later time, of the Christian spirit. 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 183 

Morality is essential and abiding, but its forms inces- 
santly change within the same faith. 

d) A similar result is obtained from a study of the 
successive doctrinal forms in which Christianity has 
found expression. The earliest Christian faith may 
have been in many instances an instinctive drawing to 
an attractive personality, an affection for him, a feeling 
of rest and security in his presence, a confidence in his 
power to meet one's deepest need, without any clear 
analysis of what is meant by such a faith. But this 
was more than the unthinking, dumb loyalty of an ani- 
mal. It was more than a mere feeling. It had mean- 
ing because it was the movement of a self-conscious 
spirit. In order to take a regular place in a man's 
life and affect all his movements, this new faith must 
needs be defined, it must receive interpretation by and 
to the man's thought. Almost from the very beginning 
this began to be done. Faith in Jesus found its first 
intellectual expression in the confession, Jesus is the 
Christ. Without raising the question how much of 
truth and how much of error there was involved in the 
identification of Jesus with the Jewish Messiah, we can 
see that this confession placed the faith in him in line 
with the spiritual growth of the Jewish people and with 
the spiritual longings of other peoples and tended to 
give the faith a clearness and a stability that enabled 
it to battle successfully for its life in a time of great 
danger. The demand arose naturally that everyone 
that professed to be a disciple of his should make this 
confession. A denial of it would bar the entrance to the 
new community. In barring him from the community 
it would shut him off from many of the sanctifying 



184 What Is Christianity ? 

influences which flowed out from that community to 
the world. To that extent the confession was necessary 
to his salvation. Thus the gospel of Jesus became the 
gospel of the Christ. "Who is the liar but he that 
denieth that Jesus is the Christ ?" It was an easy tran- 
sition from the view that he who denied the messiahship 
of Jesus should be kept out of the Christian community 
to the practice of accepting all those who were willing 
to make the confession as true participants in the spir- 
itual benefits of the Christian communion. A similar 
thing occurred when it was affirmed that Jesus was the 
Logos of God, and the same thing again when he was 
declared to be the second person in the Trinity. In 
fact this has been the history of the making and enforce- 
ment of the creeds of Christendom generally. The 
acceptance of the creed is viewed as necessary to Chris- 
tian salvation; Christianity and creed are identified. 

Now it is true that the formation of a creed is an 
inner necessity of the Christian human spirit for the 
simple reason that it is the faith of a human spirit, and 
it cannot be held as an incentive and guide to a human 
life unless it be conceived in intellectual forms, inasmuch 
as a life that is lived apart from these is less than human. 
If, then, we take the term salvation in a comprehensive 
sense as embracing the whole course of human better- 
ment, a creed is necessary to salvation. Then, if we 
widen our view so as to take in the fact that the faith 
necessarily creates for itself a community in which it 
is the sustaining force, it is plain that this community 
must construe for itself an intelligible conception of its 
faith or it will not be able to continue as a conscious 
unity. If salvation is a movement toward the creation 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 185 

of a perfect community, then a creed is necessary to 
salvation, that is, to such a salvation as the Christian 
religion brings to mankind at large. 

But when we ask, Which of the many historic creeds 
is necessary to our salvation, that is, to the better life 
which Christianity brings to us today ? the answer must 
be, Not one of them in the exact sense in which it was 
originally meant. Those creeds were a support and a 
strength to the men of other days whose needs and 
powers were somewhat differently developed from ours, 
whose aims, we may be permitted to affirm, were in 
some respects inferior to ours, who could be satisfied 
with that which would come short of satisfying us; so 
that even when we seek to utilize for our purposes the 
language of those creeds we are obliged to put a some- 
what different meaning into the words. Otherwise 
they would become an external law foisted upon a 
free spirit, limiting its normal course, preventing its 
true progress, and thereby become damning in their 
influence. Creeds are necessary to salvation; but a 
stereotyped creed? Never. Creeds, moral customs, 
churches, liturgies, belong together. The same kind 
of necessity that calls for their creation calls again for 
their transformation. 

3. We may now proceed to indicate, in the briefest 
possible manner, the lines of an interpretation of the 
Christian faith as it lives and reigns in our hearts today. 
I must warn the reader that our statements will be 
commonplace in form, but it is hoped that they will be 
found to carry with them some new meaning and force 
as a result of preceding discussions. We shall proceed, 
as before, from the more general to the more specific. 



186 What Is Christianity? 

a) Our first affirmation is : Christianity is to be under- 
stood primarily as a quality of spiritual life. We are not 
speaking here of life in the biological sense, that is, as 
the principle of physical animation that men have in 
common with lower orders of existence; but we are 
using the term as descriptive of the action of a mind, 
an intelligence, a thinking being, a being that is self- 
conscious in all of the many modes of its consciousness, 
whose activities are free because they are primarily 
directed from within itself and whose feelings are such 
as only such a free self-conscious being could have. 
Such a being has its life in the realm of the spiritual. 
Such an existence is spiritually alive. If it has physical 
or material connections, if it moves also in the realm 
of material things which other beings with a physical 
frame move in, nevertheless all these things have a 
peculiar meaning to it because they are taken up, 
understood, and used as if they belonged to itself. 
If man is a spiritual being, then his home is in this 
realm. Whatever we may say about his body, whatever 
dependence he has upon a material environment, what- 
ever connection of necessity may exist between his 
physical life and his spirit, his true life still remains 
spiritual. You only know the man when you find that 
all these other things are the externals of his life, and they 
have no importance for him as a man except in so far 
as he can take them up into the movements of his self- 
conscious spirit, in so far as he can think them, and use 
his will upon them. 

When we say that Christianity is a quality of spiritual 
life we mean that the Christian man is one who is aware 
that his interests are finally of the spiritual kind. These 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 187 

are the things that make the most effective appeal to his 
emotions, that most powerfully awaken his thoughts, 
and that call forth the finest exercise, the whole exercise, 
of his will. He will define the meaning of his life in 
spiritual terms. We mean to say also that spiritual life 
among men is of many grades and descriptions. Its 
progress varies among different groups of people and 
these become different types of spirituality. Each 
of these has some distinguishing quality that runs 
through its whole frame. Christianity is the name of 
a type of spirituality that gets its character from a 
peculiar worthfulness that belongs to it. What that 
distinctive quality is we shall try to state more fully in 
a moment. 

This is, of course, another way of saying that a 
definition of Christianity cannot be obtained from with- 
out. The story of its historical origin and progress is 
valuable for purposes of interpretation; so also are the 
monuments to its character which time has set up or 
the descriptions which men have offered of it. But the 
starting-point as well as the essential thing in the inter- 
pretation is an understanding of what is meant by the 
actual experience of the spiritual. For this interpre- 
tation the whole of the activities of our human spirit 
becomes material to be used. That is to say, all that 
pertains to the processes that go on within our spirits 
must be taken account of. When the Christian thinker 
tries to expound his faith he must make use of the 
materials, methods, and conclusions of the spiritual 
sciences at their best. Psychology, logic, aesthetics, 
ethics, metaphysics, are in part an exposition of Chris- 
tianity. In every one of these and the other sciences 



1 88 What Is Christianity? 

associated with them there is a record of the movement 
of the human spirit in its effort to fulfil itself by becom- 
ing master of the world of action, thought, and feeling 
that belongs to it. Each one of these indicates the line 
of action the human spirit must take if it would be fully 
Christian. Every step forward made by these sciences 
must be taken account of in our interpretation of 
Christianity, if Christianity belongs to the realm of the 
spiritual life. The sensitiveness of Christian thinkers to 
all the developments which take place in these sciences 
is perfectly natural, since each of them opens up more 
fully the spiritual world in which the Christian finds 
his home. For surely we cannot be content in the end 
to claim anything less than that in the Christian religion 
the free activity of our spirit comes to its highest pinnacle 
of attainment. And in saying this for the spiritual 
sciences we have prepared the way to say the same of 
the so-called physical sciences, since these too consti- 
tute the methods by which the human spirit turns the 
facts of the physical world into forces of the spiritual 
order. 

In all this we seem to be saying that Christianity is 
a natural religion. And this is exactly so, if the natural 
be set over against the unnatural — which is the proper 
antithesis. If we then proceed to add that it is also 
supernatural, this is not to be taken to mean that it 
is extra-natural in the sense that something which per- 
tains to a different world or sphere of being from that 
in which we men naturally move is brought to us when 
we become Christian. For the spiritual world is our 
human world, the world that is natural to us. As regards 
our spirit we men are supernatural, and the idea of the 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 189 

supernatural gets its whole content from our inner con- 
sciousness of superiority to the material and our ability 
to use it for our purposes. The supernatural is the 
higher natural, the natural come to its true purpose 
and its true meaning. If in the so-called Christianity 
there is found something that contradicts the natural, 
this, so far from being a source of satisfaction to us or 
a confirmation of the superiority of our faith, only tends 
to beget doubts of its value. There is no violence done 
to our spirit in our becoming Christian, nor is there some 
other nature added to our human nature in some inex- 
plicable way, so making man a dual being. But when 
the human spirit is naturally unfolded, when its life is 
normally developed, it becomes Christian. In fact that 
is just what Christianity is for. The truly spiritual 
man — he is the Christian man. 

Spiritual life is not merely given to us; it is gained. 
Men attain to the spiritual gradually and by great effort. 
The poet, the moral man, the philosopher, fulfils the 
powers of his genius through long-sustained endeavor. 
The first of these works indefatigably to make the uni- 
verse expressive of the deep harmony and unity of the 
human spirit in the realm of feeling; the second seeks 
to make it instrumental to the fulfilment of the potencies 
of the human spirit in the realm of will; the third con- 
strues it as the embodiment of those concepts which in 
their organic unity constitute the perfection of our spirit 
in the realm of thought. Progress in all these becomes 
ultimately progress in Christianity. On the other hand, 
the man whose aesthetic nature, or whose moral action, 
or whose thinking is wanton or confused or hurtful is 
for this very reason defectively Christian. The whole 



190 What Is Christianity? 

round of our spiritual life is implicated in our Christi- 
anity. When I say, therefore, that Christianity is a 
quality of spiritual life, I refer to the wholeness of spirit 
it has in it for men. The Christian man is the man that 
is whole in his spirit. 

It follows that any purported form of Christianity 
that cramps or benumbs the emotional nature of men 
by crushing its native feeling or by opening no field for 
its normal action is to that extent unspiritual and 
un-Christian. Any purported form of Christianity that 
erects or tolerates a barrier to the free movement of the 
human spirit in its thought, or that offers to a person 
some act or symbol or sacrament that he is to receive 
without seeking to understand the why or the wherefore 
of it, is to that extent unspiritual and un-Christian. 
And any purported form of Christianity that seeks to 
limit the normal action of the human will by robbing 
it of its initiative or freedom or by setting up fixed 
external standards of conformity is to that extent un- 
spiritual and un-Christian. 

Further, it follows that the ideally true Christianity, 
the Christianity that can actually be the religion of all 
men and bring all men to the perfect man, lies yet in the 
future. It does not follow that we are to disparage or 
forget the past. It is to be kept in mind and cherished 
— not as that to which we are to return but as our point 
of departure for the better. The Christianity of any 
people or period of the past was true in so far as it pre- 
pared men to transcend it and themselves. The Chris- 
tianity of the past is still true, to our minds, in so far 
as it assists us in the realization of the potentialities 
of our faith by maintaining continuity of movement 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 191 

and by supplying the impetus to life that comes from 
contemplation of a long experience. There is a sense 
in which our inherited Christian forms become norms 
for the future. By exhibiting to our minds the opera- 
tions of the Christian spirit under conditions that 
have partly passed away and partly remain, these earlier 
forms help us to divine the direction in which the same 
spirit of faith will fulfil itself under conditions partly 
similar to, and partly different from, the present. They 
assist the prophetic spirit in us to make out the way we 
ought to take. Thus they become true only in so far 
as they show the way to a better than themselves. We 
are never to forget that, if our Christianity is to make 
good its claim to be the truly spiritual religion, it can do 
so only by bringing to perfection the spirituality that 
lives in men now. The true religion is that which can 
finally be the religion of all men in that it possesses the 
power to bring all mankind at last to that unity of life 
in which each member of our race will find himself ful- 
filled and satisfied in every other. This is precisely 
what our Christianity professes to be. 

b) Christianity is a distinctive type of religion. This 
is not a mere repetition of the preceding affirmation. 
For we may speak of pure spirituality without includ- 
ing religion. One may say that in the perfection of 
the aesthetic, the moral, and the intellectual quality of 
human nature we have perfect spirituality. But this 
in itself is not religion. Neither is the unity of these 
several qualities religion. For religion exists when the 
qualities of our human nature are held together in a 
consciousness of relation to a higher being than our- 
selves. Christianity pertains to our spiritual life as a 



192 What Is Christianity? 

consciousness of relation to this Higher Beyond. In 
this regard it is a normal activity of our human mind. 
Everywhere men feel the drawing of this Beyond. They 
feel themselves constrained to think about it, to do 
something about it, and their hearts are often suffused 
with a deep feeling of happiness about it. They feel 
themselves dependent for the things they prize upon 
this Higher Being and they yield themselves in devo- 
tion to him. They vary greatly in the degree to which 
they are affected in this manner, for there are degrees 
of religiousness among men. But we may say that that 
man is the most truly religious who, in the midst of the 
most intense activities of mind and heart and will, in 
the moment when they are all concentrated in a single 
aim, is the most fully aware that he is subject to the 
action of a Higher than himself. This Higher Being 
may be conceived in thought as mightier, or more en- 
during, or more intelligent, or better than himself, or 
as including all these in the superlative degree. This 
is God. And we all feel his pressure upon us and his 
attractiveness. 

Christianity in its unity is one of the many different 
ways in which men exercise this consciousness of God. 
The manner in which the whole emotional, intellectual, 
and volitional life of the Christian is stamped with this 
God-consciousness is distinctive and belongs to no other 
class of men. It is like to all other religions and yet 
unlike them all. Men are aware of God in all religions. 
In Christianity they are aware of God in a peculiar 
manner. But, inasmuch as it does have kinship with 
all other religions, a knowledge of these other faiths is 
essential to a satisfactory knowledge of Christianity. 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 193 

If, then, we believe, as we truly do, that our religion 
is destined to become the religion of all mankind, this 
must be understood to mean that the transition from 
any other faith to the Christian faith is not purely 
revolutionary or an act of mere violence to the earlier 
faith of the convert. His conversion is just what is to 
be expected, it is the natural thing to happen, when 
the two are brought face to face. This is another way 
of saying that Christianity, my Christianity, has within 
it the power to bring all men eventually into a single 
communion of faith because all these others have that 
in them which may be regarded as Christianity in its 
beginnings or its lower stages. Hence we must say that 
any interpretation of Christianity that comes short of 
this, or that makes it out to be a religion that seeks to 
gather out of the world only a portion of our human 
family, either falsifies the character of the Christian 
faith or declares in substance that it is a temporary 
faith destined to give place to a better. Christianity 
is committed to the conquest of the world. Surely 
we do not mean anything less than this when we say 
that the Christian God is the only God. 

c) Christianity is the religion whose whole character 
is determined by the personality of Jesus Christ. Many 
religions have their Christ, though, of course, he is not 
called by that name. The most distinguishing mark of 
Christianity is that its Christ is Jesus. He dominates 
the history of Christianity and becomes the touchstone 
of all that professes to be Christian. Now the chief 
tests of all religions are their conception of God and 
their conception of man. When the Christian affirms 
that his God is the only true God, he not only means 



194 What Is Christianity? 

that his God is the only one the thought of whom can 
satisfy the universal longing of the human heart for the 
fellowship of the perfect life, but he says it because he 
has found in the contemplation of the personality of 
Jesus Christ, in the full significance of that personality 
as he now sees it, the assurance that in him lies the 
realization of that longing. This is what Christians have 
always found. Christianity is Jesus Christ's gift to the 
world. It originated through his advent into the world 
of men and it is constituted and maintained by the per- 
petuation and development of his personal character in 
them. It is his life in men. Christianity exists nowhere 
but in Christians. They are Christianity. It is as in 
them that Christ can be said to be Christianity. Thereby 
we have found the God we seek. Through him God 
has come to be the life of our life. We finally set forth 
the character of our God by setting forth Jesus' char- 
acter as we feel it and see it now after the passing of so 
many centuries. In that sense he is Lord and God to us. 
But our description of the Christian is also given in terms 
of the character of Jesus Christ. He is the true man of 
us, the man we all would be. To the believer God and 
man are one in Christ Jesus. 

Because it is so easy to use such words as these in a 
vague and senseless way we must go a little farther and 
ask, What is the meaning of the presence of Jesus Christ 
in our world? The answer may be obtained in the 
popular twofold manner — it is discovered in the meaning 
of his teachings and in the meaning of his example. 
The first of these requires much more than a summary 
of his teachings and an explanation of what they meant 
to his mind when he gave them. To know their mean- 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 195 

ing we must trace out their influence on the world of 
men from the first to the present and mark their con- 
tribution to the solution of the problems of our lives. 
The second requires that we go far beyond an attempt 
to find a rule of conduct, as if to follow his example were 
to be Christian. We must find how the knowledge of 
his career has affected the character of human living. 
This carries us on to an estimate of the worth of the 
fellowship his first followers enjoyed with him and trans- 
mitted to succeeding generations. In short, by the 
meaning of the impact of his personality upon the world 
we refer to the light which such a personality as he was 
throws on the character and purpose of all living. As 
I have already remarked, the liturgies and organizations 
and creeds of Christendom were the outcome in past 
times of efforts to set this forth, but there is only a com- 
paratively small modicum of his influence reflected in 
these. The great majority of Christians for the greater 
part of their lives have little to do with these traditional 
forms. After all, there is only an occasional reference 
to them, for most of us are so busy in the common tasks 
of life that there is little time or opportunity for think- 
ing about religious forms. The power of Jesus Christ 
is mostly felt through the subtle influence of the lives 
of Christians about us. There is an inner movement 
of our spirits toward the aim of life that comes to us 
through association with them. This, in truth, is what 
we mean by the Holy Spirit in men's hearts. And this 
was the great gift of Jesus to the world when he gave 
himself. Christianity is no mere reproduction of his 
views and practices under altered conditions. It is 
something a thousand times more powerful. It is the 



196 What Is Christianity? 

onward urge of life he has given to men; it is the self- 
commitment of men to the highest of which they are 
capable; it is the devotion of men to their fellow-men 
in the endeavor to come into perfect unity of will and 
thought and feeling with them. Christianity is the 
religion of perfect consecration to the good of the world 
of men, and this is the same as to say that it is the 
religion of consecration to the one true God. And in 
all this the figure of Jesus Christ stands before the eye 
of the Christian. He does so, however, not in the merely 
empirical form in which some matter-of-fact statement 
of what he said or did would bring him before us, but 
through the empirical facts of his career we are enabled 
to discern in prophetic vision the perfect, eternal per- 
sonality ever beckoning us on toward himself with the 
longing in our hearts to become like him. And we 
naturally call the holy figure standing at the end of the 
way by the name of him who presented it to our sancti- 
fied imagination when he gave himself to the world in 
life and death — Jesus Christ. 

The particular modes by which we shall severally 
arrive at this perfect life are important indeed, but they 
are of secondary importance. They will differ from one 
another indefinitely as men in their freedom and initia- 
tive select or create for themselves the symbols and 
instruments of their faith. Wherefore, since we must 
see our Christ with our own eyes, we must all make our 
own interpretation of the Christian faith as we seek to 
fulfil the meaning of life. For us there can be no set 
rules or fixtures for faith, for Christianity is the free 
realization, by the self-conscious spirit, of the kind of 
life Jesus Christ brought into the world. 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 197 

d) Christianity is the practice of the most perfect human 
fellowship. Long ago Schleiermacher pointed out that 
religions are communion-forming. This is pre-eminently- 
true of the Christian religion in its historical course. 
The ecclesiastical maxim of Catholicism, " Without the 
Church is no salvation," has not been treated by Prot- 
estants as a falsehood pure and simple but as a per- 
version of the truth. They have sought to preserve the 
recognition of this truth through a distinction between 
the " visible church" and the " invisible church." Both 
parties bear testimony to the common conviction that 
Christianity in its very self brings men together in a 
spiritual unity and that where this does not exist Chris- 
tianity cannot be found. 

This is not to be understood as meaning that Chris- 
tianity brings men together in a single organization as 
though the Christian fellowship had to be identified with 
an institution. For the complete institutionalization 
of a religious faith becomes destructive of the freedom 
and initiative of the individual — which is not to save 
him but to damn him. Under such circumstances there 
can be no real fellowship, but only a reduction of fellow- 
ship to the level of mechanical conformity to a fixed 
rule. True fellowship exists only where individual men 
in all their distinctiveness maintain that full self-respect 
without which mutual respect must disappear. For 
this reason also it is impossible to identify the Christian 
religion with the religion of the recluse or the thorough- 
going mystic. The one falls into the egoism that utters 
itself in censoriousness and comtempt of others. The 
other, if it do not the same, falls into vagueness and 
meaningless self-obliteration and a loss of interest in 



198 What Is Christianity ? 

other men. Christianity is the religion of the most per- 
fect fellowship because it magnifies every human life 
and enhances the worth of every factor that goes into 
the exaltation of it. Thus it teaches men to bring all 
the good things of the world into their service, and it 
makes of the whole order of things a regular medium of 
the communion of men with one another. 

A word or two must be said about the practice of this 
fellowship. It is built up by a reciprocal activity and 
receptivity. It is best expressed in those words of 
Jesus which set forth the moral unity he sought with 
his disciples: " Whosoever would become great among 
you all shall be your minister; and whosoever would be 
first among you shall be servant of all. For the Son of 
Man came not to be ministered unto but to minister 
and to give his life a ransom for many." Christian 
fellowship does not consist merely in an emotional unity 
or intellectual agreement, but it is fundamentally con- 
stituted by moral action. On the one hand, it is the 
effort to bestow one's self with all one's powers upon 
others and to find in their willing reception of the gift 
the satisfaction of one's desires. On the other hand, it 
is the willingness to become receptive to the efforts of 
others to bestow their good on us. Thus everyone 
receives and everyone gives. None is exalted to supe- 
riority and none is degraded to inferiority. As the Chris- 
tian looks upon the world of men he sees in every man 
the potentiality to become possessed of all the good that 
is in himself and he also sees in every other man qualities 
by participation in which he may himself be enriched 
in turn. All class divisions pass away. All exclusive- 
ness disappears. Everyone sees his own best self in 



What, Then , Is Christianity? 199 

others and makes himself their servant. The extension 
of the Christian communion in the world is co-extensive 
with this practice. It is in this sense we are to under- 
stand the prayer of Christ that all his disciples might 
become one in him. 

e) Christianity is the religion which is one and the same 
with true morality. There is space here for only a word 
or two on this great theme. The truth of this statement 
can be seen even in that attitude of mind in which our 
relations to our fellow-men and the moral obligations 
these involve seem farthest from our minds, to wit, in 
the attitude of Christian worship. Some would say 
that in the act of worshiping God our experience is 
religious and not moral, since in that holy moment we 
are conscious, not of our relations with men, but of our 
relations with God. He alone is said to be in mind. 
Men are excluded from the worshiper's thought. And, 
again, when we are engaged in those enterprises in which 
our dealings with other men absorb for the time the 
whole of our energies and we are seeking to conduct these 
enterprises with due regard to the interests and rights 
of other men, the experience is ethical and not religious, 
since it is man and not God whose relations to us 
are in mind. The attitude is anything but religious. 
It is about as far as we can imagine anything to be 
from the spirit of worship. However, a deeper appre- 
hension of both these attitudes will issue in a different 
conclusion. 

Take the Christian act of worship first. It is seen 
at its best when in an assembly of believers the heart 
of the worshiper is conscious of the presence and power 
of a spirit that embraces in its working the hearts of all 



200 What Is Christianity? 

who are present. To that spirit they all offer them- 
selves. It is an act of communion with God which is 
at the same instant communion with men. The prayer 
and the praise are common to all. It is not the time 
or place for private petitions or thanks for private favors. 
The unseemliness of such a thing would be instantly felt. 
What a purification of motives in prayer takes place! 
For each feels that he may ask on behalf of himself 
nothing that he may not request on behalf of all. How 
readily at such a time the heart is led to embrace in its 
cry to God the needs of all men and how near they may 
come to him! Through the personal exaltation that 
comes to the worshiper in the consciousness of his unity 
with God they too are exalted in his mind; and their lives 
take on an ideal character, a worth that can be described 
fittingly in no other terms than those which describe 
the worth of God to the heart of the believer. To his 
mind they are sanctified, his heart goes out in love and 
devotion to them, disharmonies and antagonisms among 
the worshipers are laid aside, and all become absorbed 
in the single aim to exalt and bless one another. They 
go from that assembly with a deeper realization of the 
meaning of the life they are living in common and with 
greater strength to meet one another's claim for good-will 
and service than they ever had before. In the act of 
worship together their entire lives are moralized. 

The same is true in the end even of the experience 
of "private" worship. There are specific needs and 
longings of each which cannot be uttered fittingly in 
public. In order to utter these we seek to be alone in 
our devotion. It may seem that here especially the 
world of men is excluded from our minds and the soul 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 201 

is engaged in the purest worship because it is alone with 
God. But this is a very defective view of private wor- 
ship. For the worship of prayer and praise which the 
man offers on his own behalf in the secret chamber can 
never be solely for himself. He is guided throughout 
by the consciousness that the interpretation of his needs 
flows from the fact that there are illegitimate as well as 
legitimate petitions. In every petition he is constrained 
to ask for those things alone which may be asked in 
similar circumstances for all men equally, and in every 
utterance of praise or thanksgiving he really gives thanks 
only for those things which may be no exclusive posses- 
sion of his but the possession of all. Though physically 
isolated, he is far from being alone. Indeed, one of the 
special advantages of occasional physical isolation in 
worship lies in the greater facility of conceiving the 
universal character of his wants when no single material 
figure is in his sight. The whole world is ideally present 
in the sublime moments of his personal adoration, and 
he lifts it all Godward when he lifts himself. Thereby 
his worship partakes of the highest moral quality and 
therein lies its value for the Christian. Our time and 
energies are not to be divided between God and men. 
He and they are not rivals for our love and loyalty. 
And, accordingly, when we pass out from the place of 
worship to the common drudgery of life it is with a 
profounder sense of the meaning of it all because it 
has been bathed with the consciousness that God is in 
it all. The performance of the common task becomes 
to the Christian an act of worship. "Inasmuch as 
ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye did it 
unto me." 



202 What Is Christianity? 

/) Christianity is the religion of moral redemption. 
It is not without reason that the crucifixion of Jesus has 
been the focal point of interest in his personality and 
career throughout all the Christian centuries. It 
signalizes the fact that Christian faith expresses itself 
in the man's moral struggle and eventuates in an abso- 
lute devotion to an idealized humanity; the fact that 
human life everywhere has a deep cleavage running 
through it and a bitter struggle within goes on unceas- 
ingly; the fact that the victory for those who are being 
worsted in the struggle can come in no other way than 
by the vicarious suffering and labor of those who occupy 
the higher plane on behalf of those who dwell on the 
lower. Sin and salvation are ever present to our minds 
— not as formal theological terms merely, but as sig- 
nificant of the ineradicable longing to escape from the 
worse to the better. Thus the figure of the Savior 
dominates the horizon of the Christian life. Repentance, 
forgiveness, reconciliation, atonement, are inseparably 
connected in the Christian experience. 

That which the individual experiences for himself 
becomes indicative of what must come to all mankind 
if life is not to lose its meaning and value. Hence, to 
the Christian philosopher, the whole story of humanity 
becomes the story of the deliverance of men from the 
dominion of the evil and entrance into the kingdom 
of good. The glory of Jesus Christ is that it is he who has 
bestowed that historical redemption on mankind. This 
it is that has made him Lord of our hearts and King of 
the world. He has imparted to men the redemptive 
power that lay originally in himself and made it a human 
possession for all time. "I have been crucified with 



What, Then, Is Christianity? 203 

Christ; and it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth 
in me. And that life which I now live in the flesh I live 
in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved 
me and gave himself up for me." 

g) Finally, Christianity is the religion of perfect 
peace. " Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto 
you," said the Redeemer. He is represented as saying 
these words when the supreme conflict was impending 
and he knew it. They were uttered in view also of the 
struggles into which his followers were warned that 
they were about to enter. The peace, therefore, which 
is here spoken of cannot be the same as ease or freedom 
from trial. Christianity does not deliver men from the 
obligation to enter into the conflicts of life. It does 
not save them from trial. On the contrary, it impels 
them to take upon themselves growing burdens and 
to share in the battle of life on an ever-increasing scale. 
What it does in this regard is to equip men with the 
power to endure the trials of Hie and discharge its respon- 
sibilities with a balanced mind, with calmness and con- 
fidence, and with a trust in God that nothing in the way 
of suffering can destroy. The Christian spirit adjusts 
itself to all the untoward conditions that confront it 
and lives in freedom, security, and strength. 

At the same time the Christian faces the material 
world with all its mysteries and tragedies, without 
quailing or fear. The universe has ceased to be evil to 
him. It is the arena in which he finds the necessary 
field for the action of a redeemed spirit. It is the instru- 
ment of God for the effectuation of his saving will. He 
has no dread of the discoveries of science or philoso- 
phy, but eagerly anticipates them. The thought of the 



204 What Is Christianity? 

unknown future cannot terrify him. "All things work 
together for good to them that love God, to them that 
are the called according to his purpose." He sees the 
evil world passing away and "the city which hath the 
foundations, whose builder and maker is God," coming 
down from heaven. And he is at peace. 

These, it seems to me, are the fundamental char- 
acteristics of the Christian religion. The order in which 
they have been stated above is not intended to represent 
the order in which we always experience its meaning. 
The order differs, if there be order at all, in different 
persons and conditions. But these are its permanent 
features, and all further interpretation of it consists in 
the unfolding of these according to the varying needs 
of men. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The following works, arranged according to the respective 
chapters of this book, are recommended: 

APOCALYPTICISM 

Burkitt, Francis C. Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. London, 

1914. 
Case, Shirley J. The Millennial Hope. Chicago, 191 8. 
Charles, Robert H. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the 

Old Testament in English. 2 vols. Oxford, 1913. 
. Eschatology, Hebrew, Jewish and Christian. London, 

1913- 

. Religious Development between the Old and New Testa- 



ments. New York, 1914. 
Clarke, John C. C. The Making of Christianity. New York, 1914. 
Mathews, Shailer. The Messianic Hope in the New Testament. 

Chicago, 1905. 
Oesterley, William O. E. The Evolution of the Messianic Idea. 

London, 1908. 
Porter, F. C. The Messages of the Apocalypticists. New York, 

1909. 

CATHOLICISM 

Harnack, Adolph. History of Dogma, translation, I-VII. Bos- 
ton, 1910. 

Hatch, Edwin. Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the 
Christian Church. London, 1890. 

Lea, Henry C. History of Confessions and Indulgences. 3 vols. 
Philadelphia, 1896. 

. History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. Boston, 1884. 

Rainey, Robert. The Ancient Catholic Church. New York, 1902. 

Schaff, Philip. Creeds of Christendom. Vols. 1 and 2. New 
York, 1890. 

Taylor, Henry R. The Mediaeval Mind. 2 vols. New York, 
1914. 

205 



206 What Is Christianity ? 

MYSTICISM 

Buckham, John W. Mysticism and Modern Life. New York, 

IQI5- 
Inge, William R. Christian Mysticism. New York, 1899. 
Jones, Rufus M. Studies in Mystical Religion. London, 1909. 
Tuckwell, J. H. Religion and Reality. London, 191 5. 
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study of the Nature end 

Development of Man 's Spiritual Consciousness . London , 1 9 1 1 . 
Vaughan, Robert A. Hours with the Mystics. 2 vols. London, 

1879. 

PROTESTANTISM 

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion, translation by 
Beveridge. 3 vols. Edinburgh, 1845. 

Dorner, I. A. History of Protestant Theology, translation by 
Taylor. Edinburgh, 1871. 

Hastie, William. Theology of the Reformed Church. Edinburgh, 
1904. 

Lindsay, Thomas M. History of the Reformation. 2 vols. New 
York, 1907. 

McGiffert, Arthur C. Protestant Thought before Kant. New 
York, 191 1. 

Wace, Henry. Luther, First Principles of the Reformation, trans- 
lation. 1883. 

RATIONALISM 

Benn, Alfred W. The History of English Rationalism in the 

Nineteenth Century. 2 vols. New York, 1906. 
Hagenbach, K. R. German Rationalism in Its Rise, Progress, and 

Decline. Edinburgh, 1865. 
Hoffding, Harold. History of Modern Philosophy, translation by 

Meyer. 2 vols. New York, 1900. 
Lecky, William E. H. History of the Rise and Influence of 

the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. London, 1866. 
Oman, John. The Problem of Faith and Freedom. London, 

1906. 
Stephen, Leslie. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth 

Century. London, 1876. 



Bibliography 207 

EVANGELICISM 

Clarke, William N. An Outline of Christian Theology. New 

York, 1899. 
King, Henry C. Reconstruction in Theology. New York, 1901. 
McGiffert, Arthur C. The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas. New 

York, 1915. 
Merz, John T. A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth 

Century. 4 vols. London, 1907. 
Streeter, B. H., et at. Foundations. New York, 1913. 

WHAT, THEN, IS CHRISTIANITY? 

Clarke, William N. The Ideal of Jesus. New York, 191 1. 
Fairbairn, A. M. The Philosophy of the Christian Religion. 

London, 1902. 
Pringle-Pattison, Andrew S. The Idea of God. Gifford Lectures, 

Aberdeen, 1912-13. 
Royce, Josiah. The Problem of Christianity. 2 vols. New York, 

1914. 
Sabatier, Auguste. Religions of Authority and the Religion of the 

Spirit, translation by Houghton. New York, 1904. 
Smith, Gerald B. A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion. 

Chicago, 191 7. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Abelard, 52, 128 

"Absolute sensation," 64 

Absolute, the, 64, 65 

Addison, 135 

Agnosticism, 67 

Alexandrian philosophy, 29 f . 

Allegorism, 29, 30 

Anabaptists, 74, 85 

Anglicans, 114 

Anselm, 128 

Apocalypse of John, 28 

Apocalypticism 2-37, 140 

Apocrypha, Jewish, 20-23 

Apologists, 159 

Aquinas, Thomas, 74, 128 

Arius, Arianism, 126 

Arminius, Arminianism, 133, 148 

Atonement, 112 

Augsburg Confession, 109 

Augustine, 51, 73, 100, 113 

Authority, 32 f., 93, 99, 115, 120, 
132, 170 

Babylon, 14, 17, 18 
"Back to Christ," 162 
Bacon, Francis, 134 ff. 
Baptism, 92, 178 
Baptists, 74, 114 
Bernard's hymn, 78 f . 
Boehme, 74 
Bonaventura, 74 
Butler, Bishop, 134, 137 

Calvin, Calvinism, 74, 89, 101, 
102, 148 

Captivity, Jewish, 13 f., 16 

Carey, William, 149 



Cataclysm, 173 
Catechumenate, 178 
Catholicism, 38-59, 141 
Celibacy, 51 f. 
Charlemagne, 127 
Chastity, 51 f. 
Christian perfection, 146 

Church: Catholic, 38, 73; Earlier 
or Greek, 30 f., 39, 45, 54; 
invisible, 113; "notes" of, 56; 
of England, 148; Western or 
Roman, 30 f., 39, 45 

Clergy, 49 f . 
Clugniac revival, 92 
Colossians, Epistle to, 29 
Commerce, modern, 152 f. 
Communion, 38, 84, 150, 161, 184 
Community, life, 165 fL, 197 
Comparative religion, 166, 192 
Confessions of faith and creeds, 
31, 183 fL, 195 

Crusades, 94, 127 

Damiani, Peter, 80 
Daniel, Book of, 20 
Day of Jahwe, 12 f. 
Deists, Deism, 137 fL 
Democracy, 95 
Descartes, 64, 134, 137 
Diet of Worms, 108 
Dionysius the Areopagite, 55 
Doctrine, forms of, 183 f. 
Dualism, 18, 23 f., 46, 58, 121 
Dulia, 42 
Duns Scotus, John, 128 

Ecclesiasticism, 39, 59, 175-80, 197 
Ecstasy, 72 



211 



212 



What Is Christianity? 



Education, modern, 150 f. 
Edwards, Jonathan, 145 
End of the world, 15, 19 
Enlightenment, the, 138 
Ephesians, Epistle to, 29 
Essence of Christianity, 71 
Eucharist, 43, 178 
Evangelicism, 144-71 
Ezra, 20 

Faith, 171, 175 
Feudalism, 90 
Foreign missions, 149 
Foreordination, 112 
Fox, George, 74 
France, 92, 154 f. 

German Empire, mediaeval, 87 

Germany, 92 

Gnosticism, 29, 72 

God-consciousness, 75, 191 ff., 
200 f . 

Golden Age, 9, 12 

Graeco-Roman world, 29, 70, 71 f., 
124 

Great Britain, 148, 155 

Greek philosophy 8, 15 

Greeks, 17 f., 39 

Guyon, Mme, 74 

Heaven, 15, 20, 23, 28, 30, 50, 58, 
78 

Hebrews, Epistle to, 29, 70 

Hegel, Hegelianism, 134, 138 

Heidelberg: Catechism, 97; Con- 
fession, 99 

Hildebrand, 74 

Howard, John, 146 

Hugo Grotius, 133 

Hugo de St. Victor, 74 

Hume, David, 134 

Hussites, 95, 96 

Hymnody, Christian, 148 



Hymns quoted, 44, 75, 79, 135 
Hyperdulia, 42 

Ignatius of Antioch, 39 
Individualism, 107, 154, 157 ff. 
Industry, modern, 152 ff. 
Inspiration, 21, 33, 68 
Inventions, modern, 152 ff. 
Irenaeus of Lyons, 39 
Isaiah, 20 

Jahwe: 11 ff., 17 f., 21; spirit of, 

20 
Jeremiah, 20 

Jesus Christ: 1 f., 22-28, 31 f., 36, 
48 f., 52, 56, 69, 71 f., 76, 79, 81, 
89, 92, 97, 100 f.j deity of, 57; 
heavenly, 82; kingdom of, 89; 
judge of men, 43, 93; nature of, 
3, 44 f., in, 164, 194; person- 
ality of, 124, 169, 193 f.; second 
coming of, 25, 31; sufferings of, 
44,49 

John: Gospel of, 24, 28 f.; 
writings, 70 

Judaism, 4ff., 123 

Judgment Day, 12 f., 22, 32, 35 f., 
56,93 

Justification, 111 ff. 

Kant, 134, 139 

Lardner, 159 
Latria, 42 
Lessing, 139 
Liturgies, 178 ff. 
Locke, John, 134 ff. 
Logos, 125 f., 184 
Lollards, 95 
Luke, Gospel of, 27 
Luther, 74, 88, 93, 108, 119 

Mark, Gospel of, 3, 27 
Martyrs, 48 f . 

Mary, Virgin: 21, 42 f., 45, 52, 93; 
worship of, 174 



Index 



213 



Mass, the, 43 
Material world, 167 
Matthew, Gospel of, 24, 26 
Messiah, Messianism, 5, 12, 16, 17, 

19, 22, 25, 27, 183 f. 
Methodists, 148 
Millenarianism, 32 
Miracles, 19, 59, 119, 122 f., 125, 

174 
Modernists, 74, 129 
Monks, Monasticism, 49 f., 50, 

55, 92, 94 
Montanism, 72 

Morality, 49, 181 ff., 189, 199 f. 
Moravians, 74 
"Mysteries," 39, 61 f., 72 f. 
Mystery, 70, 168 
Mystics, mysticism, 60-86, 120, 

147 
Mythology, 6-10, 24 f., 68 

Napoleon, 155 

Nationalism, 16, 22, 95 

Natural world, 167 

Neale, J. M., 78 

Neo-Platonism, 73 f. 

New Testament, 23, 25, 26, 28 ff., 

69, 7i, 73 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 135 

Nicene Creed, 31, 111; see also 

Creeds 
Nonconformists, 148 
Nuns, 52 

Obedience, 53, 55 
Original sin, 51 

Paganism, 48 

Palestine, 7, 12 

Paradise, 15 

Paul, Paulinism, 24 f., 29, 70, 113, 
124 

Peace of Westphalia, 89, 144 



Pelagius, Pelagianism, 126 f. 

Penitential system, 94 

Persecution, 104, 131 

Persia, 14, 17 f. 

Personal ideal, 160 

Personality: its worth, 166, 168; 

its sphere, 167; its fulfilment, 

158, 170, 194 f. 

Peter's confession, 3 fi\, 10, 22, 
183; see also Confessions 

Philosophy, 57 ff., 189; of religion, 
67, 76 

Plato, Platonism, 64, 73 

Plotinus, 73 

Pope, the, 54, 56, 88 

Porphyry, 73 

Poverty, 50 f . 

Prayer, 199 ff. 

Predestination, 147, 101, 105 

Presbyterianism, 148 

Press, modern, 150 f. 

Primitive Christianity, 176, 180 

Primitive culture, 6-8 

Prophets, n ff., 21 

Protestantism, 87-113, 142 

Psychology of religion, 164 f. 

Puritanism, 146 

Quakers, 74, 85 
Queen Elizabeth, 104 
Queen Mary, 104 

Rationalism, 114-43 
Redemption, 59, 73, 77, in, 
182 ff., 202 f. 

Relation of theology to science, 

187 ff. 
Religion, 84, 151, 177, 191 f. 
Religious communion, 193, 198, 

200 
Religious experience, 187 f., 202 
Religious forms, 2, 160, 177 ff. 
Renaissance, 96 
Renunciation, 47 ff., 81, 106, 169 



2 14 



What Is Christianity? 



Resurrection, 19, 31 f. 
Revelation, 19 ff., 59, 118, 122 f., 

125, 130 
Revivals, 145 f., 149 
Revolutions, political, 154 f. 
Richard de St. Victor, 74 
Ritual, 55, 83 f., in, 148 
Roman Empire, 29, 84, 95 
Russia, 155 

Sacraments, 52, 55, 82, 93, 98, 119, 
140, 179, 190 

St. Bernard, 74, 76, 78 

St. Francis, 74 

"Saints," 165 

Salvation, 167 

Schleiermacher, 165, 197 

Scholasticism, 128 

Science, modern, 156 f. 

Scripture, canon of, 21 

Sects, 174 

Sheol, 15, 18 

Skepticism, 144 

Smith, Adam, 153 

Socinus, Socinians, 132 f. 

Socrates, 64, 66 

Son of Man, 28 

Spinoza, 137 f. 

Spirit, Holy: 72, 195; testimony 
of, 94, 132, 147 

Spiritual life, 180 f. 

Subliminal self, 80 



Substance, 138 

Supernatural, the, 19, 59, 119, 

188 f. 
Supreme Being, 1, 58, 121 
Swedenborg, 74 
Swiss, the, 95 
Symbolism, 82 

Tertullian, 118 

Theology, natural and supernatu- 
ral, 135 

Trinity, the, 42, 45, 73, in, 132, 
184 

Underhill, Evelyn, 81 
United States, 154 f. 
Unity: of mankind, 150; of 
nature, 150 

Universality, 150 

Waldenses, 92 

"Wealth of Nations," 153 

Wesley, Charles, 148 

Wesley, John, and Wesleyans, 
74, 85, 146, 152 

Western Church, 31, 40, 45, 54, 
73 f- 

Westminster: Confession of Faith, 
89, 102; Shorter Catechism, 98 

W T hitefield, 85, 148, 152 

Worship, 41 ff. 

Wycliffe and Wycliffian Reforma- 
tion, 95 f. 



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